


Reach

by AmandaRex



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, FitzSimmons - Freeform, Inhumans - Freeform, Reconciliation, Romance, Superpowers, Time Travel, not fitz/ofc even though it looks like it for a minute
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-27
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-03 15:46:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 52,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5297054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmandaRex/pseuds/AmandaRex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The kiss Fitz and Simmons shared in a moment of weakness has Fitz thinking back to every moment of their shared past he wishes he could change. Knowing that isn't possible, Fitz does what he can to move on. Just when he's settling into the life dictated by the choices they've made, a mission puts him in the path of an Inhuman who may be able to help him change things after all.</p><p>Final chapters 17&18 posted, NOW COMPLETE, 2/13/2016.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Teaser

**Author's Note:**

> Officially diverges from canon as of 03x09.
> 
> Warning: Strong language.

Fitz risked a look across the lab where Jemma was buried in a stack of old books, each of them full of tabs of paper stuck between the pages and flipped open to some passage or another relevant to the mystery they were trying to solve. His jaw clenched involuntarily and he turned back to the schematic rotating on a screen in front of him. It was his design, something he'd been working on for Coulson for a week or more, but it might as well have been the first time he was seeing it for all it made sense to him. All he'd been able to think about since the moment he'd impulsively grabbed Jemma and kissed her was how much he wished things were different and how much he knew they couldn't be. He couldn't focus, couldn't think, could hardly breathe, and he suddenly felt the need to get out.

His hands scrabbled over the explosion of items scattered haphazardly over his work table, looking for something to aid his escape. By the time he found a spare tablet under a sheaf of papers, his fingers were trembling almost too much to control them at all. He struggled to transfer the design from the workstation, the tablet rattling against the table as he stabbed at it with the pad of his index finger. The sound echoed in the darkness of the lab and he flinched, staring harder at his hand as though that would somehow end the tremor.

"Fitz?" her voice came to him, uncertain and small.

He hated this feeling of having so little control over his own body, reminding him of the state he'd been in during the earliest days of his rehabilitation after nearly drowning. It was as though he'd had to trade every inch of progress he'd made in his recovery over the last two years to win the strength he'd needed to survive through this ordeal with the monolith and Simmons.

"I'm knackered, heading to my bunk," he said, the words rushing out as he scrambled to put together everything he needed to take with him and retreat.

"See you tomorrow morning? I found a few—"

"I'll be working outside the lab. Mack needs help on a few things. I'll have some time later to work on...what we've been working on, but I may not do it here," he called over his shoulder, moving faster and trying to get out before she could answer again.

"You never broke for dinner, Fitz," she said, the words tumbling out quickly. He stopped walking despite himself, just at the troubled sound in her voice. "You should get something before you rest. Or...I could...I wouldn't mind bringing you something if you're not feeling well. Perhaps we could talk."

"I really just need to—"

"Not about the...what we're working on. Not about any of that, if you don't want to."

He wanted to say yes. He wanted more than anything else in the world right then to just say yes, but it wasn't all he wanted and certainly wasn't all he needed. He wanted things to be bearable between them again. He wanted to forget what her lips felt like under his and how the heat from her skin radiated through her clothes when he'd kissed her. He wanted to shut his eyes without seeing visions of everything he'd lost by forever being in the wrong place, the wrong time, the wrong frame of mind, or on the wrong side of courage. 

"I'm sorry, Simmons. Too tired, I'll get something in the morning." He could feel Jemma about to follow him out of the lab. He'd already heard her chair scrape backward as she stood up, and he had to stop her. "If you find something, just digitize it and send it to me. I'll look at it as soon as I see the message."

"Fitz—"

His name wasn't the last thing thing he heard before he finally made himself walk away. What truly rang in his ears as he moved was the almost inaudible, hurt-sounding gasp she made as she watched him leave.


	2. The Remote Cabin

In the weeks that followed, Fitz slipped back into the pattern he'd hoped to leave in the past and began to track Simmons's location so he could be anywhere but where she was as much as possible. They had brief conversations, mostly whenever she managed to corner him somewhere. He was meticulous about giving her anything she asked for that could be delivered indirectly and making any contact they had in person as uncomfortable as possible. It made him think back to the behavioral experiments some of their classmates at the Academy had done, studies Simmons had railed against to him once she'd found her protests fell on the deaf ears of their instructors. She was always uneasy about the unethical implications inherent in subconscious behavior modification techniques, but what Fitz was engaged in was putting them all to shame. Each day was a study in subtly teaching her with every interaction that being in his presence was something to be avoided. The manipulation made him sick but he was barely able to justify it to himself by remembering it was for her, not for him, to help her let go of him once and for all and move past the last few ties between them that were holding her back.

Several of their colleagues tried to start conversations with him about the two of them, enough that he wondered if Simmons had realized what he'd been doing and confided in them. A liberal application of his temper, always close to the surface even in some of his best moments, had been enough to keep all of them at bay so far. Mack was the most difficult one to rebuff and Fitz had lately resorted to a strange hybrid of near-begging and anger, with a pathetic but emphatic, "Don't."

He needed a change, some pretext to bury himself in far from Simmons, but the one he got was one he would never have chosen. After Andrew had been captured, turned permanently into a strengthened Lash, and unleashed by Hydra, the frequent missions with injury after injury to his friends meant Fitz couldn't stay on the sidelines even if he'd wanted to. He felt guiltier than he could have ever imagined in the moments when he relished getting the call to pull on his mission gear just to escape, but each time his presence made a difference he was able to rationalize that this weakness of his at least had something to justify it.

In the field, he thought of himself as a swiss army knife with a brain attached, doing anything he could handle within the scope of his abilities. Sometimes it was patching into the odd electrical system, sometimes modifying tools in the field as bullets whizzed over their heads, or on several memorable occasions, creating diversions to get someone else to safety. If it was remotely in his power to try to make it happen, he was halfway toward the objective before anyone could try to stop him. Coulson had talked to him three separate times about being reckless before the older man had given up. Fitz wondered if Coulson was so pushed to the limit in this battle against Hydra that he'd found a way to rationalize Fitz's apparent death wish as something he couldn't solve and instead accept it as a horrible tool that at least might save another agent's life. 

Their missions seemed to be eternally under the cover of darkness, the team stealing away and hiding until nightfall to do battle and save lives. Somewhere in those moments in the pitch blackness, Fitz had grown accustomed to it and began turning down lights in any room he worked in, then limited himself to one bare light bulb in his bunk and only that when necessary. He found the darkness useful, a place to retreat to when illuminating the truth within him was the only thing he couldn't find the strength to face.

It was another night filled with the inky darkness of the hours of the day most people never see when Daisy banged on the door to Fitz's bunk, waking him from a light, fitful sleep. He opened the door to see her exhausted face behind it, immediately noting how she was still trying to hide how much she was babying her injured left shoulder. 

"Give me two minutes," he said before she could say anything.

Daisy put out her good arm to stop him from moving the door, taking a step inside the room and half-shutting the door behind her.

"I can tell Coulson I couldn't find you. This one shouldn't be too rough. The lead's good and we're going to get there quick. In and out before Lash can be there, it'll be fine."

"Why d'you say that?" he asked, grabbing his gear from the closet and pulling his shirt off with a sigh after he decided he didn't care about changing in front of her.

"Because I don't want to watch you get yourself killed, Fitz."

"I don't want to have any of you lot in danger either, not if I can be there to stop it. Anyway, it's Coulson's call, yeah?"

"Fitz—"

"Two minutes, all right? I'll be there." Fitz turned his back, letting his silence communicate the finality of what he'd said.

Daisy left with an audible sigh and Fitz pulled on the rest of his gear, loading the pockets and compartments with the many tools and gadgets he carried with him. He clicked his icer into place in its holster and set out, blinking back against the modest brightness in the hallway. After a terse briefing from Coulson they set out in the jet, all of them wearing grim looks on their fatigued faces.

* * *

Ten minutes after the mission was underway things had already gone south. Pockets of Hydra forces dotted the landscape around the remote mountain cabin where the Inhuman they'd come to rescue had hidden out and Coulson's team couldn't be sure of how many Hydra footsoldiers stood between them and their goal.

"It's times like these that I miss Gordon," Lincoln whispered to Daisy, and Fitz shuddered as a memory of that final standoff with Gordon ran through his mind. Daisy gave Lincoln an incredulous look in return, and Lincoln continued, "What? At least he could have gotten us out of here."

Coulson, apparently having overheard, looked down at his prosthetic hand. "Oddly, I can't say I miss him much," he added, and if there was any real humor in it, Fitz couldn't detect it. "We're not going anywhere until we can get the Inhuman in there to safety."

"Yes, sir," Lincoln muttered, and though his contrition appeared to be sincere, Fitz had to bat down an impulse to snap at him.

"Been tracking our friends in the bushes while you're all yapping," Hunter said quietly, leaning into the group. "Bob and I think we're being covered mostly from the west but a group is moving to flank us from the south. That means they're shorting their coverage of us to the east. If the two of us pretend to recon south, they'll pull the remainder of their men from the east and all of you can make a break for the cabin. Where we go from there, I don't know, but—"

"It's a start," Coulson agreed, then looked at Bobbi. "You're both sure?"

Bobbi's hands flexed on the battle staves she kept at her sides and she nodded once, decisively. "I believe it's our best option, sir."

"You heard her," Coulson said. "Two minutes from Bobbi's mark we head out. Call it."

Bobbi and Hunter exchanged a look and drew their weapons, taking their first steps away from the team. "Mark," she whispered, just as she disappeared into the dark.

Two minutes later, the remainder of the team circled around the east side of the cabin, moving quietly as they could through the brush. They encountered no resistance, reaching the cabin and clustering near a window overlooking a dark, rustic-looking interior.

"We'd like to avoid spooking our target, Agent Fitz," Coulson said, and Fitz nodded, producing a set of lockpicking tools from a zippered compartment that ran along his right thigh. 

"Just a little light," Fitz requested, and Coulson adjusted a small flashlight and illuminated the area around the lock. The window hardware was old and rusted from exposure to the elements and Fitz wondered if the tools were overkill, but he set to work and jimmied the window open in short order.

"Daisy, you're first. Lincoln, right behind her. Then Fitz, and I'm last. Make contact, keep your eyes open. Okay, move out."

One by one they climbed through the open window, Coulson shutting it behind him. They fanned out, beginning to thread through the small cabin, until Fitz rounded a corner leading with his icer and found the Inhuman they were seeking lounging on an old, dusty couch as though nothing at all out of the ordinary was happening.

"Heya," she said, clicking her tongue at him as though it was punctuation for her greeting. "Sure took you long enough to get here."


	3. Escape

Fitz held out his free hand but didn't lower the icer, not yet. The woman in front of him was unnerving in a way he couldn't put his finger on and not every Inhuman S.H.I.E.L.D. had encountered had wanted their help.

"Ugh, put down the gun, asshole. I'm not gonna bite and you don't want to use it anyway."

Fitz withdrew his outstretched hand and brought the icer back up with a two-handed grip, levelling at her directly. "I will if I have to, but you're right. I don't want to."

"It's not even a real gun. What does it do? Put me to sleep?"

Fitz took a step back, even more on edge. "How did you know that?"

"I can see it. If we stand here talking and—" her eyes went glassy for a minute and she looked upwards, blinking rapidly. "If I threaten your little pals out there, especially, you'll use it. I'd stay conscious long enough to figure out it doesn't feel like a bullet, then I'd get really tired and pass out."

"You can see the future?" Fitz asked, recalling Daisy's accounts of Raina's abilities.

The woman scoffed and sat up from her reclined position, putting her elbows on her knees and resting her head on her entwined fingers. "Baby, I can see it all."

"Then you know who's out there," Fitz said, holding his hand out to her again. "We aren't going to hurt you, we're here to help. There's another Inhuman hunting the rest of you down and we think he might be looking for you."

She wrinkled her nose at him in distaste. "What moron came up with that name for us? Inhuman. Wanna know who's inhuman? Those asswipes out there with guns shooting at your friends." At Fitz's concerned look, the woman waved her hands in front of her in an attempt to calm him and got that glassy look in her eyes again. "Ugh, they're far away, it's hard to...they're fine. Shit, they're kicking ass. You know that girl?"

"She's not a 'girl', she's a highly trained operative and she's here to protect you. Let me get you out of here and we'll get you to safety."

"Yeah, sure," the woman said, standing up and brushing the dust off her pants. "You call for your friends now and the old guy will come in here, tell me his name, and tell me we have to get out of here."

Fitz turned his head as far as he could without taking his eyes off her. "In here," he shouted, watching for movement out of the corner of his eye.

Coulson appeared in the doorway with his weapon also drawn, though he lowered it cautiously once he entered the room and took in Fitz and the woman on the couch. "Are you Claire Capani? I'm Phil Coulson." Coulson laid a hand hesitantly on Claire's arm and Fitz watched her shiver at the contact. "I've brought a team here to get you to safety. I know it's hard to believe us when we've broken into your home, Claire, but there are other forces heading here who are not so focused on your well-being. If you could try to trust us, we can explain once we're in the air."

The woman took a step toward Fitz and Coulson. "Don't call me Claire. I'm so over that name. I call myself Reach."

"Okay," Coulson nodded. "We can—"

"Shit," she whispered, her hands bracketing her forehead as her eyes closed in pain. "Jesus, dude. What the fuck happened to you? You're dead or...something. Fitz, jeez, you hang with a dead dude?"

Fitz brought his icer up yet again, wondering if he should have paid more attention to the feeling of deep uneasiness this woman gave him. "I didn't tell you my name," he said.

She continued to wince, her eyes closing tightly. "You didn't have to, moron. The zombie over here called you Fitz outside, like, five minutes ago. What kind of a name is Fitz, anyway? And you came here with two other Inhumans? They're fucking around searching my kitchen right now, did they not hear you call them in here?"

"You weren't there when I called him Fitz," Coulson explained, his voice patient, but tacitly demanding explanation.

"I can see your past. Your future, too. And you...holy shit." Her eyes were wide with panic and she reached out and grabbed both of Fitz's forearms in her hands. "Close your eyes. When you see what happened here a minute ago in your head, you have to change what happened. Picture us leaving. Like, fast. As soon as you see it clearly. Come on, I'm not fucking around."

Fitz felt a tugging sensation in the pit of his stomach and almost retched, losing his balance and pitching forward. Her hands, locked onto his arms, held him up firmly, as though she'd been anticipating his reaction.

"Do it, goddammit, or we're all dead," she said, her voice hard and cold in his ear.

When he pushed away the disorientation, an image of himself and Claire—Reach—formed in his mind, though it was rippled and distorted around the edges. When Coulson entered the room, Fitz willed the image of himself to tell Coulson they had to leave, making the words he put into his own mouth emphatic enough to be convincing. In the vision, Coulson took immediate action, calling out for Daisy and Lincoln to meet them at the window where they'd entered and they all left as quickly as possible. 

Once the images of them in Fitz's head were several steps into the woods toward their extraction point, Fitz felt another pull in his stomach and he found himself walking where he'd just imagined them. No more visions, no imaginary versions of himself and the team, but they were now following the thread Fitz had created inside his mind.

He still felt sick when they reached the jet, though the relief of seeing Bobbi and Hunter waiting for them in the underbrush tempered his anxiety. He strapped Reach into a jump seat at the end of the line and took the one next to her, leaning over and whispering to her with just enough volume that only she could hear him.

"What the bloody hell was that?"

"That's my superpower, Braveheart. I guess you've already figured out I get peeks at the past and at the future. I knew that part for weeks and it was already pretty cool. Then when I told my boyfriend what was happening, he pulled a knife on me and called me a freak. I don't know how I knew to do it, but I grabbed that moment in the past when I decided to tell him and just...didn't. Then I blinked, and we were cuddled up on the couch watching fucking Netflix."

"He pulled a knife on you?" Fitz repeated, still trying to take all of this in.

"Yeah, I guess that's what I get for being stupid enough to tell his dumb ass what I can do. I let him take me out for one more expensive dinner and then I dumped him. That's when I headed for my dad's cabin, 'cause I kept seeing people coming to get me whenever I Reached forward and peeked at my future."

"Why did you tell me to—"

"Why did I save your ass, you mean? If we'd stood around there talking like a bunch of idiots for just a couple more seconds, one of those assholes outside was going to come in and shoot you. Head shot. Lights out. The rest of us wouldn't have been far behind you."

Fitz blinked, and the sick feeling was returning. "D'you mean…"

"My freaky power just saved your ass. You're welcome."

"Thank you," Fitz told her, making his sincerity plain in an attempt to combat the layer of defensive sarcasm she wrapped herself in.

"Keep your gratitude, Scotty. I'll trade it for information. What are you jerks going to do with me?"

She was still posturing, but that's all it was. She was terrified just under the surface, he could see it shining in her eyes.

"We won't hurt you. We have a room, a kind of neutral place where we can make sure you have control of your powers, that you won't hurt yourself or anyone else. You'll stay there at first. We have some people who will talk to you, run a few tests. We won't run any tests that aren't necessary, but we will have to run a few. You'll have some questions too, and I promise, we'll give you the best answers we can."

"The other guys, the ones you kept me from being taken by?"

"They're called Hydra. They use people like you against other people," Fitz explained, keeping it as elemental and relevant to her particular situation as possible.

"And you?"

"We're S.H.I.E.L.D. Now, if you watch the news you may have heard some worrying things about us, but we're good, I promise. We just want to help."

Reach looked down at her lap, playing with her hands as her teeth worried at her bottom lip. "Fitz?" she said, her voice small and barely audible over the din inside the jet. Fitz ducked his head and tried to get her to look at him, but she turned away a bit. "Can I...would you mind if I...peeked? At you?"

Fitz took a deep breath, wanting to tell her no, but he knew she had to be terrified. He tried to imagine letting her rifle through his mind but still found it difficult.

"Can you not see your own future? If you look there, you'll see what I'm telling you is true."

"I can only see a little ahead. I know you treat me okay for as far as I can see, but how can I know what happens after that?"

Fitz laughed just a little. "Most of us can't see at all, you know. I'm asking you to trust me. It's a lot, but I promise you can."

"You'll be able to shove me out if I get close to something you don't want me in." She finally looked at him again, her eyes wide and terrified. "Please."

"All right," he said, reluctantly agreeing. "What do you need to—"

Before he could finish his sentence, Reach grabbed his forearm. The wave of nausea came again, but wasn't quite as bad this time. Images flashed through his mind, cascading backward through his past. A still image of him grabbing Jemma and kissing her popped up and he reeled away from it, which pushed Reach away, just as she'd said it would. Snips of him in Morocco, of watching the footage of Jemma getting pulled into the monolith, of the final showdown with Gordon, of Gonzalez's second S.H.I.E.L.D. raiding their base, of Ward's betrayal and the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D., all the way back to the moment he and Simmons had been introduced to Coulson.

When she released his arm and he came back to the present, he leaned forward, breathing hard and trying not to be sick yet again. He reflected on what he'd just seen and it suddenly occurred to him that it had been many events that might not have been the most reassuring things for her to see.

"Some of that was out of context. I know a few of those moments looked odd, but—"

"You guys stopped them," she said, her voice softer now. At Fitz's questioning look, she continued. "The assholes who released the shit that turned me into this freaky...whatever I am now. You stopped them."

"We did," he said, trying to follow this thread that she seemed to find reassuring. "We never intended for that many people to get hurt. It just...a lot of it was out of our control."

"I saw, it's okay. I saw you, too. You aren't an asshole, and you aren't lying to me. Or at least, you don't believe you're lying to me. I'd be able to…" she trailed off, giving him an odd look.

"You'd be able to tell?" he asked.

"You're the first person I wanted to tell this to. Any of this. But this part is weird."

"I sort of specialize in weird. I think you can tell that from what you saw."

"If you'd been lying to me, I would have been able to...taste it." She chanced a look at him, laughing a little at his look of surprise at her explanation. "It's weird. I guess the sense I have of it has to tie into a sense I'm more familiar with?"

"Now that…" Fitz began, "That's just bloody fascinating."

"Ugh, you're such a nerd," she said, rolling her eyes and looking like the teenager she'd been not that many years ago. "But you're like...an inventor?" She took in his mission gear and then looked around the jet at their heavily armed companions. "A...combat inventor? Is that even a thing?"

Fitz laughed. "Hardly. I go where I'm needed, I do what needs doing."

"You're the fix-it guy. Fitz, the Fix-It Guy."

Fitz raised an eyebrow at her. "You've had a rough day, so I'll let that one go. You can call me what you like. I suppose this is better than calling me by the names of famous Scotsmen. You were going to run out of those soon, mind, so it's better you find me a permanent nickname now."

"Shit, I had two more ready to go. Now I can't use them?"

Fitz heaved a heavy sigh, over-dramatized for her benefit. "So you were holding on to Shrek and…?"

"Scrooge McDuck," she said, laughing when the look of disgust passed over Fitz's face.

"At least you used the heroic ones first and were saving the ogre and the waterfowl for later."

She smiled for a minute, but then it disappeared. "I'm really going to be okay? Tell me the truth."

Fitz weighed the options, wondering what the others would tell her if they were faced with the question. "I won't pretend this isn't dangerous, having powers that organizations like Hydra know about and seem to want access to. If I didn't tell you that, you'd know I was lying. If I have something to say about it, though, you're going to be fine. And my friends here, they're going to do everything they can to protect you as well."

"You'll come to see me after we get wherever we're going, I can see that much, but it's because you want to, right? 'Cause I'm like the annoying little sister you never had."

"Yeah," he said, his mood buoyed upward when he saw her pleased reaction. He considered the possibility that she'd swept through his mind all the way back to his somewhat lonely childhood, years of which had been spent longing for a sibling to keep him company. If she had been able to see so far so quickly, this talent she had was unimaginably powerful. "That much, I can promise to you."


	4. Return to Base

Jemma was there to meet them when the jet returned, accompanying the medical staff. Reach was walking so closely to Fitz as they disembarked that he almost had to grab her arm just for stability, but he didn't want to spook the girl so he did the best he could to stay upright around her on his own. He caught Jemma's eye just for a second as she moved forward to help, but he had to look away when Reach abruptly stopped walking.

"Shit, shit," the girl said, under her breath, and doubled over. "This is...Fitz, help me."

Fitz leaned down to her. "What's wrong?"

"It's too bright. It's too much. That jerk over there is about to come grab me and they're not gonna let you come with me. I'm not ready for this. Argue with them," she said, her eyes wild with panic. "Please."

Fitz saw one of the doctors approaching out of the corner of his eye and he put out a hand to stop him. "She'll come with you, but I'm going to stay with her, all right?"

"Agent Fitz, all due respect, but—"

"All due respect, it's what she asked for. Now, _I'm_ not asking, I'm telling you what I'm going to do. Work around it. I'll leave if she asks, but that's it." Fitz watched Jemma flinch over the doctor's shoulder and it made Fitz realize how protective he felt of their new charge. The girl was barely out of her teens, found herself with powers she'd never wanted and was still trying to figure out, and now she'd basically been kidnapped by one shadowy group of strangers to avoid being killed by another shadowy group of strangers. If she felt better having him there because he'd allowed her a peek inside his head, he was going to make it happen.

"Fitz—" Jemma began, but she was cut off by the doctor.

"If you're coming, then let's go, Agent Fitz."

"Hey asshole, let him talk to her," Reach said, stepping between the doctor and Fitz. 

"No, it's all right," Fitz said, putting a hand on Reach's shoulder to still her. "Jemma, I'll find you when I'm done here, yeah?"

"That's fine," Jemma called down the hallway as Fitz and Reach were lead away.

When there was enough distance between them and Jemma, Fitz leaned over to Reach and whispered to her quietly. "That's Jemma Simmons, she's my—"

"I know who she is," Reach said, fixing him with an unreadable look.

Fitz swallowed hard, feeling ridiculously exposed. If one of Reach's powers allowed her to taste if someone was lying to her, certainly she had absorbed some sense of how he felt about Jemma and their situation when he'd allowed her to peek inside his head on the jet.

"Don't get freaked out," she said, her eyes straight ahead again. "I can't afford to have you bolt, you actually sort of trust me. You're practically the only one here who isn't calculating how to knock me out if I get dangerous. You know, even if I pretend to attack you, you still defend me from them?"

Fitz shrugged. "I can hardly argue with you, now can I? Wait, did you just do that and then, what...rewind it?"

"I do it a little more than you might think," she admitted. "You'd be surprised how better life is if you can go back a minute or two and nudge things your way."

"Maybe that's why I feel a bit strange," Fitz said. "You've done that with me around, what, three or four times now?"

Reach was quiet, pointedly not answering his question.

"I see," Fitz said, pretty sure he was interpreting her silence correctly. "More times, then, I suppose?"

"Yeah, more," she confirmed, chewing at her bottom lip as they walked.

"Could you try not to alter my timeline too much? It may not be much, but it's mine, all right?" he said, taking a shot at making a joke of it to lighten the mood.

"Listen, I don't fuck around with stuff just to do it. I just try to make sure things are gonna be okay," she spat at him, lashing out at him as she had before he'd gained her trust.

"I'm sorry," he told her, automatically apologizing, and he heard her sigh in response in a way that oddly reminded him of Jemma. "I mean, you kept me from getting shot. I suppose I shouldn't be ungrateful."

Their footsteps echoed in the hallway as they reached the white room she'd be staying in. Reach took a peek inside when the doctor opened the door for her, then huffed out a breath.

"What is this place, a fucking insane asylum? A white room with padded walls?"

"It's built to accommodate a wide range of possible Inhuman powers, and to minimize any possible damage in the event those powers are not yet under control," the doctor rattled off, the dry facts of the room's construction made somehow even more clinical-sounding with his robotic delivery.

Fitz entered the room first, hoping to inspire some confidence and make Reach feel safer doing the same. She gave him one more uncertain look and then followed him, several members of the medical staff on her heels.

"Give her a minute before you descend on her, honestly. Bloody vampires," Fitz snapped, but he was stopped by Reach's hand on his arm. 

"It's all right, I can see it now. They're just going to take a little blood and take my heart rate and crap like that. It's no biggie, Fitz."

The three members of the medical staff were across the room, setting up the equipment they'd rolled down the hallway with them. Fitz felt a little lightheaded when he saw a half-dozen syringes on the tray and he wondered if he'd be able to stand here without feeling sick while they drew that much blood from her. 

Reach moved closer to him, looking up at him quickly before looking back at the floor. "I should probably tell you something. It's...sort of about what you said in the hallway."

"You can if you like," Fitz offered. "It can wait, though, if you'd rather just get through the tests."

"No, now," she said, sounding determined. "You wanted to know how many times I've wound back around you before. It's only three times since we got out of the plane, but back at the cabin…" She trailed off, wringing her hands and looking like she was losing her nerve.

"It's all right. This is making you upset, and it wasn't an important question. Just me acting like an arse," he smiled at her, trying to let her know it was okay to drop it.

"That time you got us out the window safely? The one you remember? We tried other things…" she stopped, looking up as though she was trying to remember something, "...I don't know. Fifty times, maybe?"

"I'm glad you got us out of there, then. I have a friend who'll want to talk to you," he said, thinking of Daisy and the team she was trying to build. "You have a knack for helping people, when you're not busy cursing at them." 

"No, you're not getting it. Sometimes those Hydra assholes shot me too, but they got you every...single...time. Until that last one, the one you can remember. We all got out so many times, all of us but you. You kept dying," she whispered. 

Fitz wasn't sure how to feel, but at the moment, he was going with 'punch to the gut'. He was about to say something, not that he was sure how he could respond, but the medical staff picked that moment to finish setting up. 

One of the two women who had accompanied them here (a nurse, Fitz thought, he had a dim memory of being introduced to her a few months before) came to lead Reach over to a chair where they could hook her up to the equipment and record her vital signs, and the doctor began to draw the first vial of blood practically the moment she sat down.

Fitz turned his back for a moment, trying to catch his breath. It wasn't every day you found out you'd died fifty times only to be saved each and every time by someone you'd just met. Maybe this explained how he felt so sure she could be trusted, some part of him remembered all those alternate timelines she'd erased. 

"I'll be okay, Fitz. You can go. You told your friend you'd find her. You should do that," Reach grabbed for his hand and managed to put on a smile for him, but she looked so small connected to all that equipment and Fitz wasn't sure he should do as she asked.

"I'm sure it can wait—"

"It can't. Go," she said, with an edge to her voice now. 

She knew something he didn't and to say it unnerved him was putting it mildly.

"She'll want the results of these tests and to do the bloodwork," Fitz explained. "I can wait long enough for that."

"Ugh, you're so fucking smart but you're _so fucking stupid_ , Fitz. Take a hint." She looked up at the doctor, who'd just begun drawing the third vial of blood. "Could you ask Fitz to leave now, please? I'm a little tired." She smiled sweetly at Fitz over the doctor's shoulder, Fitz rolling his eyes in response.

"Right, right, I'll go," he told her. "But I'll come back if you need me. Tell anyone here to fetch me if you want, d'you hear me?" 

Reach shooed him away, making flicking motions with her hands and he huffed back at her, but he did as she asked and slipped out of the room. He didn't get far away before he ran headlong into Jemma, the two of them almost colliding as they both negotiated a blind corner in the hall.

"Oh! Fitz. I was just coming to check in with Ms. Capani. Is she all right?"

"Yeah, I think she's going to be fine. Little nervous at first, but I can't blame her after what she's been through today."

"From what Daisy told me, it sounds that she's rather lucky. Hydra arrived just before you?"

Fitz nodded. "Yeah, but with Bobbi and Hunter on tactical we stayed a step ahead of them." He paused, wondering why he was feeling reluctant to tell Jemma anything else about the mission. Specifically, he was feeling fairly close-lipped about Reach's powers, but there was no reason to conceal any of that from Simmons.

"It's confirmed, though, she's an Inhuman?" Jemma asked and Fitz nodded, but before he could continue, she spoke again. "She seems to have taken to you rather quickly," Jemma added, an odd tone in her voice. Too light, too casual, not at all the way she'd usually sound when she was faced with even the tiniest of mysteries.

Fitz felt an odd reservation about divulging the details of Reach's powers to Simmons, but he pushed it away, rationalizing that she would find out everything eventually. "Her powers are incredible. She's only had them a short time, but she's developed them on her own quite a bit. She can look into the future or the past. Her own, or…" he drew it out, wanting to engage Jemma's natural sense of curiosity, "...if she makes physical contact with another person, she can look at parts of their past and future as well." 

"That's...quite amazing," Jemma admitted.

"But that isn't even the end of it!" Fitz gushed. "She can make small alterations to the past, and they affect the outcome."

Jemma's face was a mask of skepticism now and Fitz could guess the nature of her reservation. The current prevailing wisdom in the study of physics suggested the impossibility of time travel, and this power of Reach's at least danced on the edge of being classified as some kind of temporal manipulation.

"I know what you're thinking, but I've seen it first hand. She altered the outcome of the mission. We would have been ambushed in the cabin where she was hiding out, but she yanked me back a few minutes into the past to get the team moving faster and we were able to avoid it. I remember both timelines, Jemma."

Fitz considered telling Jemma everything, that there hadn't been just one rewind but dozens of them, and that Reach had done all of it to save his life specifically, but he had a sense that he should hold onto that information for now. Jemma seemed very cautious of the story he was telling—arms folded protectively over her chest, noncommittal facial expression—so he decided to stop there for now.

"I'll keep your anecdotal account in mind, then, while I'm analyzing the data they're collecting right now," she said, her tone clipped and more than a little dismissive.

Fitz pushed back a flare of irritation, remembering that Jemma still seemed to be disconcerted, at least to a degree, when confronted with Inhuman powers. If he was honest, the constant upheaval to his personal understanding of the universe whenever they discovered another Inhuman's set of talents was quite the challenge to a scientist's mind. This had also been, until a moment ago, the most civil, friendly conversation they'd had in weeks, so he wanted to do what he could to preserve the peace.

"I'm sure you'll reach the appropriate conclusions with or without my account," he offered, attempting to pull the conversation from possible argument into neutral territory. He scrubbed the back of his head with his nails, biting back frustration at this mess they'd made of every aspect of their relationship. Not only had they made an utter hash of any chance they'd ever had at being anything more than friends, their working relationship and friendship of more than a decade seemed to have been sacrificed to the mistakes they'd made with each other as well. He'd been pushing her away in an attempt to protect himself and protect her from being hurt as well, but being near her again, even this colder version of her, made him realize how painfully he missed her.

"I'll manage," she said, pushing past him, toward Reach's room.

"I could help," he called after her, immediately wondering how those words had escaped his mouth before he'd given them any thought at all. They were clearly on edge with each other, even more than they had been, and he was proposing to spend hours working next to her in the lab? The last time they'd done this, when they were still researching re-opening the portal together, it had led to the kiss that had destroyed everything. 

"Yes, because what I was just thinking when I was devising some sort of protocol for studying these test results was that I needed someone with a solid _engineering_ background," she said, her voice so hard and loaded with sarcasm he hardly recognized it. "It would be so very useful."

His temper flared, more with frustration from thinking about how miserable he'd been without her than with what she'd said. "Yeah, not sure what I was thinking. I'll gather myself and my paltry single Ph.D and go back to tinkering with my electronics, shall I?"

"No, instead, you'll probably go to Coulson and put yourself on every mission he plans from now until the end of time, or at least until you get yourself killed," she returned, whirling around to face him. Her eyes were alight with anger and frustration, her hands reaching toward him as though she wanted to shake some sense into him.

"Whatever's got you so angry, could you leave it out here? That girl in there," he said, taking the two steps that closed the distance between them and putting them close enough he could almost feel the heat from her body on his, "she hasn't done anything to warrant you treating her poorly."

"Now you're questioning my professionalism?" she said, leaning even closer to him.

"If you don't like it, don't give me reason to," he said, standing his ground and looking her directly in the eyes.

"You can't even work in the lab with me there. You have me digitizing my findings to send to you so you can look them over in private. You traipse back in here after field missions, palling around with Inhumans whose motives haven't yet been determined, and I'm being unprofessional?"

His mind was aflame with a million cutting words, his anger so close to the surface that he could hardly think past it. One or two well-placed verbal barbs from him, knowing her as well as he did, could hurt her quite profoundly. He took a few breaths, their faces still inches apart, and reined himself in. This wasn't them, it wasn't how he wanted them to be, and he wouldn't play his half of a scene that would destroy what little they still had left.

Fitz took a step back and heaved one more breath. "She needs your help, all right? You're annoyed with me, that's fine. Leave it there. She's young, she's alone, and she's scared."

Jemma shook her head a little, as though she was coming out of some kind of trance. She brought the heel of her hand to her forehead and leaned into it, her eyes closing, an anxious tic she'd developed since her return through the portal. With one gesture, he was reminded of everything she'd been through and was still struggling with, and he felt awful going at her like this.

"Listen, I'm sorry," he told her, dropping his hand on her shoulder briefly before moving away. "I haven't been—"

"You've been everything I could have asked for, Fitz, and done more than I have a right to ask you to do. Please don't apologize."

He nodded, suddenly unsure what to say. She decided for both of them, brushing his hand with hers for a moment before she turned around, disappearing down the hallway toward Reach's room.

Fitz sighed, needing something to do with this excess energy thrumming through him. He headed for his bunk, deciding he could settle for a change of clothes and a run on the treadmill.


	5. Transition

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Been tied up with my FitzSimmons Secret Santa fic and work on this had slowed almost to a halt, something I'd like to rectify now. Really wanted to move this story forward, so here is a quick chapter five before all heck breaks loose tonight on the Winter finale of AoS.

Fitz ran, the steady thump of his feet on the treadmill's conveyor belt echoing through the gym. He could feel his thigh muscles burning, but it didn't bother him as much as it would have even a year ago. Sometime during his rehab he'd found a way to relish this kind of physical activity instead of merely enduring it or avoiding it altogether. It reminded him of how far he'd come, how the experiences of these years on Coulson's team had changed him. He wondered if Reach would find herself on Daisy's team after some training, and if she would be given a similar opportunity to grow as she contributed to something greater than herself.

He was still lost in thought when he heard someone enter the room behind him. A glance behind him revealed Daisy moving through the darkened room, still wearing her mission gear but looking much more at ease than the last time he'd seen her. He hit the stop button and began gradually to slow his gait. 

"Fancy meeting you here," Fitz said, grabbing the towel from the handrail and scrubbing it over his face. The sweat still stung in his eyes and he tried to blink it away, stepping off the treadmill to meet Daisy halfway.

"I just got done talking to your girl," Daisy said, a teasing glint in her eye.

Fitz rolled his eyes. "I was the first one to find her, it's nothing more than that. She needed to trust one of us or we'd have never got out of there with all of us in one piece. Anyway, she's practically still a teenager."

"She's 20, you know, and you're not such an old man," Daisy shot back, raising her eyebrow at him. At his silent, impassive expression, she continued, "All right, so it's not like that. She has one hell of a crush on you, though. Kept asking about you until I thought Simmons was going to lose her temper, but she grabbed her data and bugged out instead."

Fitz sighed, unhappy to hear that Simmons apparently hadn't been able to put her reservations about powers like Reach's aside long enough even to get her initial findings and data collection.

"I'm sorry about that. You know Jemma doesn't mean anything by it really. Doesn't mean she doesn't trust you and see you as a friend, just like she did before."

"What would that have to do with me?" Daisy asked, genuinely confused.

"Jemma and her...well, her uneasiness with Inhuman powers. She's always been a bit cautious, you see. As scientists, it can be hard for us to incorporate something that looks as much like magic as some of your powers do into the way we see the world. You have to understand, though, she doesn't...she's not really—"

"That's not it. She wasn't freaked out about Reach's powers, or at least it didn't seem like it. Reach kept asking us about you. Kept calling you...Shrek? And Scrooge McDuck? Said it was some sort of private joke?"

Fitz laughed, finding himself amused that she'd managed to work in the nicknames she hadn't been able to use on him directly.

"I don't know if I've ever seen Simmons that...businesslike, I guess? Polite but angry?" Daisy continued.

"You haven't been paying attention, then. Simmons excels at polite but angry, if she thinks it's warranted. I just don't know why should would be—"

"She's jealous, Einstein," Daisy interrupted.

"What is it with everyone and nicknames today?" Fitz wondered aloud, dodging what Daisy had said entirely.

"But I'm getting the feeling you and Simmons are none of my business," Daisy said, apparently deciding to back off after Fitz failed to take the bait. "So let's talk about Reach instead. She has powers I can't believe. She could be an enormous asset to what we're trying to do here, and she seems like she's got a good heart. You think that too, right?" Daisy asked.

"Yeah, I do. She…" Fitz trailed off, strangely reluctant again to talk about the specifics of how Reach had saved his life, even to Daisy. "She helped us on that mission more than any of you realize," he said, settling for giving a vague clue instead.

"What do you mean?"

Fitz sighed, wondering what he could say when he, himself, didn't really understand what had happened earlier that night. "I'm not really sure yet," he admitted. "I think I need to talk to her a little more to understand exactly what she was able to do."

"I think you should do that," Daisy agreed. "She trusts you, and I think it would help her to talk about this whole thing with someone." Daisy looked down at the floor for a moment, then met his eyes again. "When I changed, you were the first person to make it clear you'd be on my side, no matter what happened. I haven't forgotten that. I don't know what I would have done if…"

"Hey, I just did what a friend would do," he said, feeling a little self-conscious at Daisy's admission.

"Oh, you just falsified test results and lied to pretty much everyone else you know to keep me safe until we could figure out what was going on with me," she said, her eyes dancing with amusement.

"Yeah, like I said, what any friend would have done," he said, laughing a bit.

"I wanted to let you know I'm planning to recommend to Coulson that you do most of the talking to her, at least for now. Just remember, she also has a crush on you. Like, the size of a planet. You need to be careful with her."

"Nah, you've got it all wrong. She's like my annoying little sister, she said it herself. And she only just met me today. I'm not one of those Ops guys with the abs and the hero...thing. It'll be fine, you'll see. She was scared earlier today, needed to find one person she could trust."

"And that's how I know how lucky she is, because she picked you," Daisy said, communicating nothing but sincerity through her eyes and the gentle pat she laid on Fitz's arm. "Just be careful, okay? You promise? With her and with you?"

"Yeah, 'course I will," he agreed.

"I'm on my way to talk to Coulson, then," Daisy said. "I need him to agree that the two of us should work with Reach right away, give her the chance to see what she thinks about helping us out. She could be amazing on a field team, but she needs to learn control of her powers either way. Skills like that, if they got out of control..."

"I can imagine," Fitz said, wondering if he should feel strange about Reach having used her powers so extensively to save his life. They didn't know anything about how her time alterations worked, and there could be consequences they weren't prepared for. "I'll need to bring in Simmons, as well. We still need to study these powers, make sure Reach won't get herself or anyone else hurt."

Daisy nodded as she started to walk away. "I'll defer to you on the sciency stuff. If you need Simmons, bring her in."

Fitz watched Daisy leave, hanging his towel around his neck as he realized it was nearly dawn and he was still up. What he needed was a shower and some sleep to help him get some perspective. He had a job to do and he'd need to work with Simmons to do it, no matter how badly he'd managed to muck things up with her.


	6. Worrying Results

After a few hours of sleep, Fitz forced himself up at the sound of his alarm and got himself into the shower. He wanted to try to get back on a normal schedule, and more importantly, get back into the lab. He and Simmons still had some issues to work out together, but he was determined to do just that—work them out. It might be difficult and certainly would be awkward, but he was willing to fight to keep her in his life.

When Fitz got to the lab, he found Simmons surrounded by screens at her workstation. It was a truly dizzying array of statistics, only some of which he was able to recognize. Simmons seemed particularly interested in the careful breakdown of data from a comprehensive metabolic panel on the monitor in front of her, though she also seemed concerned about an EEG pattern as it raced across the surface of a tablet she was holding up. Simmons was making notes as she worked through the explosion of data, pursing her lips in the way he knew indicated she was deep in thought.

"Morning, Simmons," he said, trying to keep his voice light and act as though he hadn't spent weeks avoiding the lab while she was there. He moved around the room getting a few things and prepared to work as Simmons stared at him. He didn't know if he was doing the right thing, if pretending things were normal would make it easier for them to find a way to work together or make things worse, but it seemed like the best way to jump back in without making things more difficult than they needed to be. To his relief, she seemed to accept his sudden return, and she returned his casual greeting with one of her own.

As Simmons settled back into her note-making, Fitz began to revise a few schematics he'd been tinkering with, backburner projects Coulson had asked him to look into months ago. It seemed easier to start with something that felt more neutral rather than jumping straight into their research on re-opening the portal, though he intended to return to that once he and Simmons were more comfortable being in the lab together again. 

They worked in silence for awhile before Simmons interrupted him, frowning at some of the data she'd been studying. 

"Fitz," she began, sounding hesitant. 

He turned to her, trying to look encouraging, but he was feeling so off-balance that he had no idea if he was successful or not. "Did you find something?" he asked, hoping a leading question would help cut through the awkwardness of the conversation.

"I'm seeing some things here I don't really like," she said, pointing at the shape of the EEG on the tablet.

"What do you mean?" he asked, setting down his work and crossing the room to take a closer look.

"Even for what we know so far of Inhuman physiology, these readings are incredibly atypical. I'm not sure what this indicates specifically, but it's very concerning. There are waveform abnormalities in her EEG that would suggest a very poor prognosis if observed in someone who wasn't an Inhuman. While we've found Inhumans to exhibit fairly unique physiology from subject to subject, this is much more extreme than anything I would have anticipated." 

"But as you just said, Inhuman physiology is different."

Simmons nodded, but the distressed look on her face didn't change. "It's certainly possible. This could be a natural manifestation of her transformation."

"You don't look as though you believe that," Fitz noted.

"This is…" Simmons paused, looking at Fitz as though she knew exactly what she wanted to say but wasn't sure he wanted to hear it, "...quite severe. If I hadn't been in the room myself when we performed this EEG, I would have said it was impossible to maintain consciousness while experiencing brain activity like this."

"But if she can, it must just be a different type of Inhuman transformation than you've seen before." Fitz watched Simmons closely, his heart breaking a little when he saw only worry and stress there, and none of the excitement she'd once had for any possible scientific breakthrough. It hadn't been that long ago that they'd had to actively remind each other not to get lost in fascination with the extraordinary things they came into contact with as members of Coulson's team, but Simmons's passion for discovery seemed to have been a casualty of her trip through the portal. "You're practically inventing the study of an entirely new branch of biology, Simmons. There's bound to be a few surprises."

"I'm not sure you're understanding me, Fitz. I'm concerned Ms. Capani could be putting herself in danger when she uses these powers."

"Do you remember how things were for Daisy at first, until she learned how to control her powers?" Fitz asked, thinking back to the damage Daisy had done to her own body in an effort to suppress the powers she now had well under control. "We should talk to Daisy about bringing in Lincoln. She said he used to help some of the Inhumans who went through their change at Afterlife, and he's got a medical background himself. He may have some perspective here that could be useful."

"Perhaps you're right," Simmons said, more to herself than to Fitz. "I'm not sure what conclusions to draw, honestly, because we're in such new territory. It's possible she needs to focus on understanding and controlling her new talents because, without that control, they could kill her whether she consciously uses them or not. I can't be sure of that, though, Fitz. She could be doing more damage to herself each time she uses them and it may be better to counsel her to avoid using them entirely. I'm not sure which could be more destructive."

"Is there any more analysis of the data that can be done to give us a clearer answer?" he said, letting his eyes run over the facts and figures on the screens around them. "I can help you with that, just get me up to speed on what each of these test results represents. We can gather more data, run some simulations, see if that gets us to a better answer."

"I'm really sorry, Fitz." Jemma turned her face away, hiding her expression from him in the shadows. "I wish I had more definitive recommendations. I can see how important this is to you."

"We'll talk to Daisy and Lincoln. The four of us will be able to find an answer here, I'm sure of it," he told her, still trying to put his finger on why her demeanor seemed a little odd. She seemed guarded, though she didn't seem to be withholding any information from him. "Are you worried she could hurt someone other than herself?"

"It's a possibility, but given these test results, I think it's much more likely she'll do damage to herself. I'd like to collect more data, and if possible, monitor her while Lincoln and Daisy work with her. If I can get a better idea what her baseline readings should be, we'll be in a better position to help her long-term."

Fitz nodded. "We should see Coulson, and pull in Daisy as well. I doubt Coulson will need anything other than your interpretation of the results to convince him, but we should probably put together something to bring with us in case he'd like to see more."

Simmons tapped on a tablet she was holding, opening the most important data she'd collected and arranging it on the display so it would be easy to present it. "I'd like to stay here and keep working with this," she said, avoiding his eyes. "I trust your understanding of it is more than adequate to convince them to follow our proposed plan."

Fitz took the tablet when she held it out to him, wishing yet again that things weren't so strained between them. An impulse flared within him to just have it out with her, apologize for impulsively kissing her and complicating things between them further, but dragging her into another conversation she honestly didn't seem prepared to have seemed selfish.

Instead of saying anything at all, he gathered his things and walked away.


	7. Preparations

"So, that went well," Daisy said to Fitz as they walked away from Coulson's office, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

"He agreed to the plan," Fitz pointed out, though privately, he felt just as frustrated as Daisy sounded.

"You know, every time I think he's actually going to trust me to put together this team, I need to remind myself that he's _never_ going to, not really."

"Daisy—"

"I know you want to make me feel better, but you were in there. You heard him. He thinks I can't do it." 

Fitz could hear how demoralized she felt and he sympathized. He wasn't exactly doing cartwheels after the hour they'd spent arguing against Coulson's resistance to the plan Fitz had walked in there to propose. The reticence had taken him by surprise, actually, though Daisy had seemed to expect it.

"It's not that he doesn't think you can do it," Fitz told her, hating the sense of defeat Daisy had taken from their meeting. "He's become so hesitant to move forward after what happened with Andrew. It's not about you, Daisy, it's clear how much faith he has in you. He just wants you to be cautious."

"Well, when he asked me to put together this team of Inhumans, I thought he trusted me too. When he blocks me at every turn, though? Second guessing every recommendation I give him? That's gotta be more than him being a little spooked about Lash."

"Don't read too much into it," he urged. "He'll come around."

"I'm glad we didn't bring Lincoln in there with us," Daisy added. "I don't mind Coulson treating me like a kid in front of you, you understand what he's like. If he does this in front of anyone I'm supposed to be leading, though, they'll never take me seriously."

Fitz stopped, dropping his hand on Daisy's shoulder to turn her toward him. He needed to get through to her, because this meeting seemed to have shaken her confidence really badly. "We all take you seriously, Daisy, Coulson included. Look at what you've accomplished, all the things you can do, all the risks you've taken for S.H.I.E.L.D. and for our team." He remembered what Daisy had looked like, blood streaming down her pale, exhausted face, after she'd held the portal open for Simmons to return. "We wouldn't have Simmons back if it weren't for you," he whispered, feeling his throat close up a little. "No one could possibly doubt you and what you're capable of. Coulson just wants us to be careful."

Fitz was pushed backward a step or two when Daisy suddenly hugged him, squeezing her arms around his rib cage until he nearly had trouble breathing, then she pulled away, reaching up to ruffle his hair affectionately.

"I miss the curls sometimes," she told him. "I think Simmons does too."

"Bollocks," he said, ducking his head away from her with a smile.

"God, you're so British sometimes."

"Quite sure I'm Scottish all the time," he countered, relieved to see Daisy a little more light-hearted. "Come on, let's find Lincoln and rope him into helping us, all right?"

"Yeah, go Team Inhuman!" Daisy said, putting up her hand for a high five, which Fitz awkwardly returned with a theatrical groan at her Americanness. "Well, Team Inhuman plus you. You can be an honorary member." 

"Thanks for that, reminding me I don't have any amazing superpowers. That's not at all depressing," he teased, following her toward Lincoln's quarters.

"Who said you don't have superpowers?" Daisy said, shoving her shoulder into his as they walked side by side. "You were born with yours, I had to wait around for mine."

"What are you on about?"

"Your head, genius. You're, like, stupid smart. Wait, that doesn't make sense. You're super intelligent, that's what I'm trying to say. Total superpower."

Fitz snorted his derision. "Yeah, that's me, all right. Superhero," he said, sarcastically.

* * *

Lincoln sat back in his chair, looking thoughtful as he considered what Daisy had just told him. 

"Have you seen anything like this before?" Fitz asked, unable to wait any longer for Lincoln's impressions. "Simmons was concerned about the test results she's seen so far, but we don't have a lot to compare them to." Fitz offered the tablet Simmons had prepared for him to Lincoln, watching him carefully for a clue to his initial impressions.

"I've seen some pretty wide variations from regular human physiology, but never anything exactly like this," Lincoln said, his tone a little distracted as he paged through the results. "We didn't do a lot of standard medical testing at Afterlife, though. Sorry, I wish I could offer you more insight than that." Lincoln handed the tablet back to a disappointed Fitz.

"You can help us now, though, can't you?" Daisy asked him.

Lincoln nodded quickly. "Of course. There are a lot of techniques I can help her with, help her find a way to control the talents she's been given. I've seen some pretty extreme abilities, more than a few that would have been dangerous without someone to guide them through the transition, but I never saw anyone at Afterlife we couldn't find a way to help. I'm sure we can do that here, make sure these changes aren't actually dangerous for her."

"How should we start?" Daisy asked, rubbing her hands together.

"Well, I can see why Simmons is concerned, based on that," Lincoln began, pointing at the tablet. "We'll need to start at square one with Reach, teach her new ways to access her powers. I have a hunch her brain is trying to use what's left of her old neural pathways from before her transformation to channel her abilities, bypassing or ignoring the changes her body made to accommodate them."

"Yeah," Daisy agreed. "That's what it felt like for me, when I started to figure out how to control the quakes. It felt like trying to train a muscle I'd never used before, one I didn't even know was there."

Lincoln was nodding emphatically as Daisy spoke. "We can work with her to help her understand how not to hurt herself, but she needs to know that once she begins to embrace the way her body works now there's no going back. If she tries to backslide, she'll really hurt herself. Everything Simmons is concerned about and more."

"If we monitored her vitals while you worked with her, would we be able to help direct her training?" Fitz asked, trying to create some kind of safety net. 

Lincoln nodded. "It's a good idea, might help us pinpoint techniques she needs to learn to keep herself safe and protect everyone around her."

"I'll talk to Simmons," Fitz told them. "When would you like to start?"

"As soon as Reach agrees to it," Lincoln said. "Hell, right now, if she wants."

"Let's go see Reach then," Daisy said, turning to Lincoln. "But I bet you she'll want to check in with Fitz first, too."

"Yeah, that's fine," Fitz said, distractedly, thinking through the conversation he was about to have with Simmons. He remembered, with a little sadness, a time not that long ago when he wouldn't have had to carefully consider anything he said to her, but it seemed necessary now. "Just let me know when you'd like to start."

* * *

In the end, it wasn't hard to arrange Simmons's help. The words were hardly out of Fitz's mouth when she began to gather equipment onto a rolling cart.

"Simmons, I don't know if we're to start straight away, or—"

"We should," she said, her words clipped. "If Daisy and Lincoln are free, we shouldn't waste a moment."

"Are you that concerned?" he asked her, putting his hand on her arm to gently turn her toward him. He couldn't tell what she was thinking, where this almost panicked insistence was coming from all of a sudden. "Simmons," he said, pleading with her to help him figure out how to read her again. Being in the same room with her and feeling practically like strangers was killing him.

"I'm sorry I worried you before. We can help her, Fitz. _I_ can help her, I promise." Simmons pulled away from him, circling to the other side of the cart and putting it and the devices she was piling atop it between them. "Even if it turns out the answer is that her powers need to be suppressed to save her life, I'll find a way to do it."

" _We'll_ find a way," Fitz told her. "All of us. You. Me. Daisy and Lincoln."

Simmons forced a smile at him, but it was so obviously less than genuine that it sent a bolt of regret through him. 

"Simmons...are you all right?" Fitz chased her to the other side of the cart and she turned away, uselessly rearranging the items she'd piled there yet again.

"Why wouldn't I be?" she asked, but she couldn't sell the air of confusion she was trying to affect, not even with her face half-hidden.

He tried, he really did, but he couldn't swallow down the frustration yet again. "Because you're not!" Simmons flinched, her shoulders hunching as she froze, dropping a blood pressure cuff. "Neither am I, and we shouldn't have to pretend we are. Not with each other."

"I'm not sure what you want me to say," she whispered, her voice shaky. "You've helped me with everything I've asked, even when Coulson's pulled you into the field. I'm merely returning the favor."

"Is that—is that what's got you so upset? That we're not making progress on the portal?" _This_ , Fitz could understand. Of course she had a right to worry that this work might stall their progress on Will's rescue.

"No," she said, quickly. "I can't expect you to devote all your time to that, and you've already done so much. Even being able to rule out what we have, it's more than I had expected to accomplish in such a short time. I can take it from there, Fitz. I know your priorities should lay elsewhere now."

Fitz frowned at her. "Coulson will need both of us from time to time, of course. Doesn't mean I'm giving up on what you need me to do." He swallowed hard, wondering how else she could possibly have interpreted his retreat from the lab. He'd meant to make clear that he was still working by keeping her up to date on his progress, but she must have taken his disappearance as an indication of how little he was willing to assist her.

"I don't…" she said, straightening her back and turning completely around. "I don't think we should discuss this now. This new project deserves our full attention while we're working on it."

His jaw tightened. He wasn't sure how to argue back, or even if he should based on how upset she seemed. "We don't have to talk this out now, Simmons, but I think we should, and soon." He risked brushing his fingers against her shoulder, taking a deep breath of relief when she didn't pull away. "I haven't been very clear, and that's down to me, but if you think I've given up on what you asked of me…"

"Fitz, I—" Simmons began, but was interrupted when Fitz's phone chirped away in his pocket. "That'll be Daisy," she said, and his heart sank when he saw how relieved she seemed.

Fitz pulled out the phone, thumbing the icon carelessly before bringing it to his ear. "Fitz."

"We're good to go here, but Reach wanted to talk to you before we start. When can you—"

"I'm on my way," he interrupted, his nerves on edge after the trying, confusing conversation he and Simmons had just been slogging through. "Sorry," he said, the apology coming automatically when he realized how brusque he'd sounded. "Just me, then?"

"I think she's on board," Daisy clarified, "but she wants your opinion before we go forward."

"Tell Reach I'm on my way." Simmons stiffened over the cart, her posture rigid, and her fingers whitened as she squeezed the handle. It was just for a moment, though, and she relaxed back to normal so quickly Fitz almost believed he'd imagined it. He disconnected the call after Daisy hummed her acknowledgement.

"I'll let you know—" Fitz said, but he was cut off.

"You can send Daisy or Lincoln for me when you and Reach are ready," Simmons said, turning away to search through a cabinet for something.

"Simmons," he began, but he didn't know what else to say. 

"She's waiting," she returned, her arms motionless inside the drawer.

He left, sure that he'd somehow managed to make things worse.


	8. First Trials

Fitz knocked at the door and Daisy opened it, slipping past him with Lincoln into the hall as she whispered, "I'll wait out here while you go in, but Lincoln wants to talk to Simmons. Do you think—"

"I'm sure it's fine, she was getting some equipment together when I left her and she's quite willing to help," Fitz told her. 

Lincoln squeezed Daisy's shoulders and left to find Simmons, and Fitz noticed Daisy's eyes following him until he disappeared around the corner. 

"He's a good man, that one, isn't he?" Fitz asked.

"I'll let you know when I'm sure I have it figured out," Daisy returned, with a bit of a smirk. "My track record with guys, not exactly stellar."

"Daisy…" he began, not sure what to say. "I'm sure he—"

"I'm making a joke, Fitz. Mostly, anyway. You don't have to worry about me. I'm more worried about getting this team together and how to deal with Coulson right now than anything else. The other stuff, it's gonna happen or it's not, you know?"

"Yeah, but we're friends, you and me. If you need to talk...I mean, I know I'm not the best one to ask about that kind of thing, but...for what it's worth."

"It's worth a lot," Daisy returned, her eyes fixed on him. "But right now, Reach needs to talk, so get in there, big guy." Fitz nodded and started to turn toward the door, but Daisy stopped him one more time. "And hey, you too. If you need to talk, I mean. All right, now you can go. I'll be out here."

Fitz rapped gently on the door a couple of times, though it had never shut all the way after Daisy and Lincoln had opened it. Reach called out for him to come in and he pushed the door open slowly, pulling it shut behind him.

Reach was sitting on the edge of the bed and there were two chairs pulled up nearby, where Fitz imagined Lincoln and Daisy had been sitting as they talked to her. Fitz moved into the closer of the two, waiting to see if Reach wanted to start first.

"I get these really bad headaches sometimes," she whispered, looking upset. "Only since I had my...change, and usually after I try to use the powers. I told Lincoln. He didn't seem surprised."

"Did Daisy tell you what her powers did to her at first?" Fitz asked, wondering if knowing that Daisy had found a way to control and use them without doing harm to herself would help Reach.

She nodded. "Daisy's pretty cool." She looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. "They told me not to use my powers. At least, not to use them if I wasn't hooked up to a million machines to make sure I'm not killing myself."

"You know we're not going to let that happen, don't you?" Fitz said, quickly. "That's the point of all this, to help you find a way to control it. Lincoln's done this a lot, I don't know if he told you. He used to live in a place where a lot of people went through a change like this, and he was one of the people who helped them do it safely."

"Yeah, they told me. But they also told me that I might have to stop, or not use it as much." She looked up at Fitz, the worry in her eyes clear. "I haven't been able to do this for long, but I'm not sure I can go back. I've been sitting here trying to keep myself from looking forward to see how this turns out. It's really hard not to."

"Can't imagine how difficult it must be."

"You're worried," she said, abruptly changing the subject. "It tells me...I can sense some things at a distance, especially if what's happening is kinda intense. Like I knew your friends were fighting off those goons in the woods when you came to rescue me? I don't know what causes that part, I don't really have control over it. I just sorta...overhear stuff."

"I am worried, but I also know that Daisy, Lincoln, Simmons, and I are going to help you and nothing's going to happen to you, all right? Me worrying, that's just—"

"Not about me. You think you're going to lose her. You weren't fighting, but the feeling...whatever it is that makes it to me, it was really strong."

"You have to try not to do that, at least until after you get more control over this."

"You're changing the subject, but I get it. It's kind of creepy, this power I have. I don't blame you for being mad, but I didn't mean to eavesdrop on you. I don't know what you said, for what it's worth, I just get vague impressions."

"I'm not angry, I'm serious. I've seen the test results. You can't use this power unless you're working with us to control it."

"It's really gonna kill me, isn't it, Braveheart?"

Fitz noticed the nickname, realizing she'd used it in an attempt to hide how scared she really was, a joke to downplay her fear.

"No, it's not. Not if you let us help you."

"God, I want to peek forward," she said. "But I won't. Not yet. You really think this will work?"

"If this doesn't, we'll find something else that will."

"You mean stop using my powers," she said, and it sounded like an accusation.

"If you have to stop, I'll keep looking for a way for you to use them again," he promised. 

"I guess I really can't use them if I'm dead." Before he could respond to that, she continued. "They said we could start right now. I guess that's what we should do. Can you get them?"

* * *

Fitz sat off to the side with Daisy, watching as Simmons and Lincoln set up the equipment they'd wheeled in. Fitz was thinking about how he might be able to contribute, if he could build a device to would help Reach monitor herself while using her power. Simmons carefully arranged the sensors for the EEG that would allow her to observe Reach's brain activity and Fitz tried to visualize some kind of wearable design that would allow for constant collection of data. It could be a lot less obtrusive than the standard electrode sensors with their trailing wires. The contact points could be built into some sort of headset, but he'd need to talk to Simmons about a few things before he began crafting a final product.

"Are we ready?" Lincoln asked Simmons, who nodded as she moved to a chair at the back of the room, looking at a tablet whose screen was already lit up with activity.

"What should I do?" Reach asked, her hands nervously fisting themselves in her lap.

"Start with something simple, something small," Lincoln suggested, walking closer to her and then crouching in front of her.

Reach closed her eyes, wincing for a minute, and then they flew open again. "She's going to say I should stop," Reach said, pointing to Simmons.

Simmons opened her mouth to speak, then shut it, the words having been stolen from her. "I was indeed going to suggest that. This is the same thing we were seeing before." She got up, walking to Reach and stood behind Lincoln. "I'm also scanning for what I believe is your neurologic pain signature and there was quite a flare a moment ago."

"Pain signature?" Lincoln asked.

"It's rather new research I've been reading about and I felt it might be useful here. I found it after seeing the initial test results we gathered on Reach's arrival. I didn't know if it would apply to Inhuman physiology, but it appears it does." Simmons elaborated.

"It does hurt, a little," Reach admitted. "It always does. It's worse when I use it a lot."

Fitz thought back to Reach's rescue from the cabin and the dozens of times she used her power in an attempt to save his life. The pain must have been terrible, by the end, though she hadn't shown much outward sign of it.

"Do you feel different, since your change? Not the power, you. Your body. Something new. It might even feel foreign or wrong to you right now." Lincoln asked.

"Yeah," Reach began, haltingly. "It's hard to explain. I don't even know what it is. It's just this feeling. I don't know what to do with it, though."

"Good, Reach. That's great. I want you to shut your eyes. Breathe with me a couple of times. In," he said, taking a deep, audible breath afterwards. "And out," he finished, letting his own breath go. "Again." They went through the cycle a few more times. "Now listen to my voice, okay? Keep breathing, but listen to me. Find that piece that's new. Wherever it is, and you don't even need to know where, just find it. It's part of you now, you just don't know how it fits in yet. That's normal, a lot of people who go through this change have the same struggle. It's you, but it's not, right?"

"Yeah," Reach agreed, her voice breathy and strained.

"It feels like it's not you, but it is. It's what you'll become, if you can accept it. Have you found it?" Lincoln asked.

Reach nodded, her lips pursed together in concentration, leaving her unable to speak.

"Try it again. One quick look forward, and then stop."

Simmons looked down at the tablet, still standing behind Lincoln. Fitz couldn't see anything from where he and Daisy were sitting, so he found himself holding his breath until one of them said something.

"It's better," Simmons said, sounding cautiously optimistic. "There are some variations in the pattern, but the pain signal is weaker. Is that how it felt to you?"

Reach looked frustrated. "A little better, yeah. But not a lot."

"I wasn't expecting it to work on the first try, all right?" Lincoln added quickly. "Take a second and we'll try again."

"Could I try with someone else? The headaches aren't as bad if it isn't my future I'm looking into." Reach looked at Fitz, obviously hoping he would volunteer. "I know it's a lot to ask."

"I don't mind," Fitz said, standing up and moving to sit next to Reach, holding out his arm.

"Can you roll your sleeve up? It's easier that way," she explained, but he was already doing what she asked. Her hand hovered over his forearm and she looked at Lincoln and Simmons.

"Okay, same thing," Lincoln said. "Close your eyes and concentrate on what's new, the way you just did. Wait until you can really feel it. And when you're ready...go ahead."

Reach breathed a few times as Fitz watched, then her hand suddenly fell and grasped his arm, her fingers loosely curving around him just below his elbow. He felt a brief wave of nausea, but it was gone as quickly as it came. He could feel her there in some way, though not as intrusively as her peek into his memories had felt before.

"Okay, that's probably enough," Fitz heard Lincoln say, but his voice sounded odd and far away until Reach took her hand off his arm. When Fitz opened his eyes Reach had opened hers, already looking rather triumphant.

Lincoln looked back at Simmons and all of their gazes followed, waiting for the results.

Simmons tapped at the tablet for a moment before she spoke, smiling as she took in the data in front of her. "Very little unusual activity. Minor change to the EEG, no neurologic pain signature."

"Yeah, that!" Reach added, making it clear she'd known what was coming. "So, am I cured, or whatever?"

"Slow down," Lincoln cautioned. "You've done it once, so we know it's possible. Now you need to learn a whole new way to think. Everything's changed for you. You need to develop new reflexes, so you can do this without having to consciously think about making the shift."

"I know what can help," Daisy offered. "At least, I think so. I need to talk to May. If she isn't able to do it, I might be able to help a little, with what she's showed me. It really helps me focus," she said, this time directly to Reach. "It might work for you too."

"And Fitz," Simmons added, which made Fitz give her a puzzled look. "The most successful trial we had by far was with his support. You should be here until we're sure the new patterns are more ingrained."

"It was nothing to do with me, I'm sure," Fitz protested. "All I did was sit here, Reach did all the work. I think I can help more directly, next time. These electrodes have to be a distraction, all these wires everywhere. I can mod a headset, I think, and embed the sensors into it. I just need the specs on these," he said, tapping one of the electrodes with his index finger, "and I can have it ready before we try again. I can build a new receiver program for it, as well, something to make it easier to monitor the results."

"Yeah, that might be a good idea. It's hard to concentrate when I feel like a bomb or something." Reach looked at Fitz with such an exaggerated look of wide-eyed innocence that he suddenly knew she must have seen something a moment ago, during the trial. "Do you think you could do it right away? I'd like to try again as soon as possible."

"Fitz and I can build it," Simmons said, though she refused to look up from the tablet. "It's important. We can set aside our other work and have something by tomorrow."

"Simmons, but we—" Fitz argued, but he was curtly interrupted.

"Of course we can, if you're willing to work on it now as well?" Simmons said, still looking away.

"If I can borrow all of this," he said, gesturing to the wires and sensors attached to Reach's head, "I'll go straight back to the lab, and get started. Can I just...do these just pull off?"

"Just pull carefully," Simmons cautioned.

"I'm off to find May," Daisy said, though she leaned over to whisper something in Reach's ear first that made the younger girl burst into a wide smile.

"Simmons, could we go over a few things?" Lincoln asked. "I had some thoughts about setting upper and lower tolerances for these readings, and a couple of concerns from other transitions I've been involved with that we haven't addressed yet."

Simmons nodded, looking haltingly over at Fitz as he began to remove the third electrode from Reach's temple. "Fitz, can you finish here? The rest of the equipment is ready to go."

Fitz nodded and Lincoln led Simmons from the room, leaving Fitz and Reach alone.

"All right, what do you know that I don't know?" Fitz asked, and Reach burst out into laughter at the accusation. "It's good to see you in better spirits," he noted, though he pouted a little for her benefit, as the reaction seemed to amuse her.

"The two of you need to work together. I wish you could see your past the way I did. The two of you apart, it's all shadowy and black. And she was gone, wasn't she? I don't know where, but it was far, wasn't it? That was like huge, red gashes all the way through you. It wasn't like that before. Even in the bad times, you were better."

"It's not that simple. Things have happened, things we can't take back. I've made too many mistakes."

"I can help you," she insisted. "I can help you fix what's happened. You know I can. If you made a mistake before, I can get rid of it for you."

"No," he said, quickly refusing. It wasn't until she offered that he realized he'd subconsciously been wondering if she could selectively cut out the places where he'd gone wrong and at least get him to a place where he and Simmons could be friends again. Now that it was on the table, though, he was afraid it would just make things worse, or alter something that he didn't have a right to change.

"It doesn't have to be a one-shot deal," she insisted. "I got a flash of something on that last try, of how much bigger this power is. Once I train it, I think I can show you what might have happened without actually changing anything. Like a preview. You like it, we keep it. You don't?" she asked, and snapped her fingers, "I put everything right back where I found it."

"You saved my life this way," he said, "and I'm grateful. But there are principles here. Have you heard of the butterfly effect?"

"I _have_ watched some science fiction, Fitz." 

"Then you know that it might be dangerous to change things."

"You…" she said, blinking at him while she searched for the words. "You think I'm dangerous. That this power is dangerous."

"I didn't say that," he said, emphatically stressing each of his words. "Use it to save lives, to keep people safe. Those things are worth the risk. But to change this? I'm not even sure that's fair."

"What if I could just show you what would happen, and promise I won't actually do it. Can we just try it, while I'm practicing how to control this thing?"

Fitz hesitated, not at all feeling like he was prepared to answer this question responsibly. Reach was a genie offering him his three wishes, and he didn't know if he'd be strong enough to turn them down even if he knew it was wrong.

"We'll talk about it, all right? I need some time to think, and I still have to meet Simmons in the lab tonight."

"Take her dinner," Reach said, more like a command than a suggestion.

"Dinner?" he asked.

"I know you do it, I saw it. I just didn't want you to not do it for some reason, like if this conversation got you all confused and you didn't think of it. Come on, you already think she isn't eating enough. Take her dinner, she's really going to appreciate it. Now get out of here, okay? I need to rest."

Fitz left and headed for the mess, feeling a lot like bringing dinner for them to eat in the lab would be cheating somehow, but not enough to avoid doing it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Minor science nerd notes here: EEG headset designs that make the process of EEG waveform data collection a lot more comfortable actually do exist! Fitz would be several years behind the curve here, invention-wise, but let's pretend that's not true in the AoS universe so our boy can again be a technical pioneer. Also, there has been some fascinating research on accurate ways to monitor pain response, the particular study where I got the idea for Simmons to monitor this response dating back to 2013. Not only can you take readings from someone and compare them to later readings of that same person to gauge how much pain they are in, you can extrapolate your findings to a person who has had no baseline test done and predict how much pain they are likely to report.


	9. Does Talking Make it Better or Worse?

Fitz was staring into the pantry in the mess, knowing as he was systematically eliminating every possible food choice that he was overthinking things. Worse, he was overthinking it as an excuse to stall until it was too late to bring any food to the lab and he could avoid the situation entirely. He picked up a bag of dry beans, turning it over in his hands, frustrated that even knowing what he was doing didn't make it easier to stop.

"Hey, mate. How's things with the mind reader?" Hunter's voice came from behind him, startling Fitz enough to make him throw the beans back onto the shelf. "Didn't mean to scare you, just here to get something to eat."

"She's not a—well, I suppose I don't know how to explain her ability, exactly. Mind reader might not be that far off. I think she'll be okay. She just had a bit of a breakthrough, actually, starting to learn how to control her powers."

Fitz and Hunter reached over each other to pluck different boxes off the shelf. Fitz turned his over in his hands, staring at the pictures on the package as he wondered if anything was going to seem palatable to him right now.

"Yeah, Bobbi mentioned something about that. Talked to Simmons about it, I think. The pair of them sounded a bit concerned. Glad to hear it's going better."

Fitz slammed his box back down, picking up another one that he was now only pretending to examine. It seemed Simmons was consulting with everyone on the base but him, and worse, he had no one to blame for it but himself. He had been the one to freeze her out.

"Oi, take it easy," Hunter said, putting his hand on Fitz's shoulder. "You want to talk about it? Might help me take my mind off my own troubles, so you'd be helping a friend out."

"Your own…?" Fitz stammered, unsure if Hunter wanted him to ask for more details or not.

Hunter waved his other hand dismissively. "Nothing out of the ordinary. Bob thinks I was being an arse, and if I'm honest, she's right. I'm just stalling for the usual amount of time it's smart to wait before trying out a real apology." Hunter decisively chose a box from the shelf in front of them, then nosed inside the refrigerator and added two more bags to his pile. "Come on, you can help me chop," he added, disappearing into the next room.

"You can cook?" Fitz said, watching as Hunter began to arrange everything around a cutting block on the counter in the mess.

"Yeah, but I'll deny it if you mention it to anyone else," Hunter began, with a wink. "Turns out, making dinner for Bobbi is the easiest way to get her to talk to me again. Couldn't cook more than beans on toast when I met her. Now I could probably go undercover in a restaurant kitchen and not be too out of place." Hunter shrugged. "Probably says more about how little we see eye to eye than anything else, but I don't really have much choice. Went and fell in love with the bloody woman, Fitz. Can you believe that?"

"Yeah," Fitz said, chuckling a little to himself.

"Yeah, you know exactly what I mean, don't you?" Hunter returned, not looking up from the green beans he'd begun to cut. "It's all right, mate. You don't have to say anything if you don't want to."

"I...well, it appears we're here for the same reason. Well, not _exactly_ an apology. Don't know what to call this, honestly."

Hunter fixed Fitz with an appraising look. "I think I understand what you mean. Turns out you're the luckiest man in the Playground, 'cause I'm willing to double this up for you. Bobbi's tastes are disgustingly healthy, and I'm assuming Simmons is the same. Go get more of all this stuff and I'll show you how it's done."

When Fitz returned, Hunter wordlessly passed him a cutting board and then gestured at the knife block, barely pausing his own cutting as Fitz scrambled to emulate Hunter's movements. Fitz wasn't a total slouch in the kitchen, but he was struggling to keep up as Hunter's pile of neatly sliced ingredients began to grow.

"Mack's gonna kill me," Hunter mumbled to himself, just as he finished cutting his share of the vegetables. "You know that container of cooked brown rice Mack always keeps topped up in the fridge over there? We're gonna borrow most of it and hope he'll forgive me for it later. Could you go get it for me?"

With a cautious look, Fitz pulled the container out of the fridge and carried it over to Hunter.

"This is Mack's 'magic weightlifting fuel'," Fitz observed, as Hunter poured most of it out into a large pan on the cooktop. "He's surely going to miss—"

"I'll stop by and break the news to him on my way back to Bob's quarters. He'll forgive me, especially if I tell him half of it was for you." Hunter winked, tipping broth out of its container into the rice with one hand and stirring the mixture together with the other.

"What about the rest?" Fitz asked.

"Heat up that other pan with just a touch of that oil, then toss the rest of this whole mess in there. After that, the secret ingredient." Hunter looked both ways, theatrically, before adding, "It's cheese. Makes everything palatable, even this lot of rabbit food."

Hunter issued a few more orders as they finished up and divided the finished product in half, each of them ending up with their own stack of food container, pair of plates, and pile of cutlery.

"We will never speak of this again," Hunter whispered to Fitz, leaning toward him over the items he balanced in his arms. With a shove of his foot against the door, he disappeared into the hallway toward Bobbi's quarters.

Fitz looked at his own stack and sighed, trying to picture what he should do when he got to the lab. If this had been _before_ (a nebulous term Fitz used privately to refer to his life before he'd confessed his feelings to Simmons at the bottom of the ocean) he would have simply strolled into the lab and handed her a plate. Could it possibly still be that simple?

* * *

Fitz concentrated on keeping his bad hand as steady as possible as he weaved through the corridors toward the lab. Everything was smooth until Daisy suddenly came up behind him, startling him enough when she called out a greeting that the silverware on top of the plates threatened to topple to the floor before Fitz leveled his hands again.

"Oh, sorry!" Daisy said, and when Fitz turned, he could see her hands out in front of her, as though she'd been about to use her superpower to help him avoid dumping the meal on the floor after she'd surprised him.

"No need to pull out the big guns, I've got it," Fitz told her, and Daisy smiled as she dropped her hands.

"I'm the one who almost made you drop it, so it would have been the least I could do," she said, falling into step beside him. "What's on the menu?"

"Sort of a vegetable/rice thing...not sure, honestly. But I've had a forkful or two already and it's surprisingly not awful."

"Reach already gets food delivered to her," Daisy said, eyeing the pair of plates he was carrying. "While she's under evaluation she has to stick to the foods on the Inhuman intake protocol. You know that, right?"

Fitz looked at Daisy for a moment as they walked, confused. "This isn't...I'm headed to the lab."

Daisy's eyes lit up and Fitz squeezed his shut for a step or two, groaning softly to himself. The last thing he needed was—

"You made dinner for Jemma! You made this and you're taking it to her. God, it's time someone made her eat, she's wasting away. And it's healthy! You made her healthy vegetables and you're taking them right to her." Daisy was keeping her voice to a whisper, at least, but Fitz wished she'd stop talking altogether. This wasn't exactly making him less nervous about what he was doing. "Do you have candles or anything?" she continued, and that was the last straw for Fitz.

"I'm just taking some food to the lab, and I made enough to share because I'm too hungry to wait and it's rude to eat in front of someone who hasn't got something to eat herself. We're working late and I know she'll want to work straight through until we're done. It's not...this huge thing you seem to think it is."

"I bet you and Jemma did this a lot in the old days, huh?" Daisy asked, sounding slightly chastened.

"Well, strict lab protocol would preclude bringing food into the lab, but yeah, there were times we wouldn't have eaten at all if we hadn't snuck something in with us. At the Academy, and then at Sci-Ops, usually we spent more time in the lab than out of it."

"So if you rewound the clock a little, this would just be business as usual, right?" When Fitz nodded, Daisy leaned in closer and whispered very softly. "Then there's no reason to walk in there looking like you're headed for the guillotine."

"Did I look like—"

"Like a dead man walking, Fitz."

"Well, right then," he said, trying to school his features and body language into something more casual, relaxing a bit when Daisy gave him a thumbs up.

"I talked to May, by the way. She's on board to help us with Reach. She knows so many focus and relaxation exercises, tai chi, meditation. I didn't know how excited she'd be, given...you know...Dr. Garner, but she actually sounded like she was looking forward to it. I'm not sure May is all that great about having extra time on her hands."

Fitz nodded. He could certainly understand that.

"I'll leave you here, then," Daisy said, just as they were reaching the lab. 

Daisy helped him with the door as his hands were full, then looked into the lab at Jemma, who was already engrossed in something inside the microscope at her workstation. Daisy's eyes flitted between Jemma and Fitz a few times before she patted him on the shoulder and then, ever so slightly, nudged him forward before she left.

It wasn't until Daisy's push that he realized he had indeed been hesitating, though he couldn't imagine what else he could do at this point. Though it appeared Simmons was completely occupied by the work in front of her, he knew how observant she was. He was here now, dinner in hand, and there was no losing his nerve now.

He walked in, wondering how it could possibly feel so strange just to put one foot in front of the other and move toward her. If he couldn't find some way to put things right with her—his best friend—in their lab, of all places, he could rightly assume that it simply couldn't be done.

"Fitz," she greeted, not glancing up from the microscope, but apparently able to identify him by the sound of his footsteps. The familiarity should have been reassuring, but it wasn't. It carried with it the weight of who they'd been, before the pod, before Maveth, and it was the pressure of those implied expectations that threatened to suffocate them now.

Fitz walked to an empty workstation and began to wordlessly set up dinner, robotically performing the tasks of arranging the silverware and plates. This was what he might have done years ago, bringing something like this to her and setting it up without comment, especially if he'd caught her spending too much time in the lab and not enough time looking after herself. He wished she would look up and just join him, no words, no argument, no looks of expectation or disappointment with each other.

"What have you—" she began, but he couldn't let her continue. He had spent too long overthinking everything that had ever happened between them and one more analytical conversation was going to push him into actual psychosis.

"It's just some dinner," he interrupted, gesturing to the plate across from his without looking at her. "I haven't eaten yet, and I didn't think you had either. I made a little more than I needed for me and brought it with me. You're welcome to however much of it you'd like." Without waiting for her, he opened the container with the food in it and began to spoon some out onto his plate.

"I wouldn't want to take—"

"I can't eat all this, and you know I'm rubbish about leftovers. If you don't have some, the rest is likely to go to waste. Now, if you're not hungry, that's another thing, but don't think you're putting me out if you have some," he said, simply, hoping she could meet him halfway with the sense of mundane normalcy he was trying to affect.

He could feel her eyes on him as she pushed her stool back and stood up. She hesitated for a few moments before he saw her moving toward him out of the corner of his eye. Struggling not to outwardly react, he waited for her to settle opposite him and reach for the large spoon stuck into the vegetables and rice before he looked up to acknowledge her, feeling silly for wondering if even that tiny gesture would frighten her away.

"Thank you," she said, a bit stiffly, as she took some food for herself. She poked her fork tentatively through a few vegetables and brought them to her mouth, and then surprisingly, moaned a little after she'd had her first taste.

"So it's okay, then?" he asked, letting a little of his relief through in his voice.

"More than okay, Fitz," she said, taking another bite, then self-consciously covered her mouth while she chewed. "I had no idea how hungry I was until now. Really, thank you."

He smiled a little to himself, careful to aim it toward his plate. They ate in silence for a few moments, the quiet punctuated only by the sounds of their forks scraping against their plates.

"Sorry I couldn't bring anything to drink," he told her, once he realized he was starting to get thirsty himself. "Didn't have any hands free for it."

Simmons paused for a moment, then pushed her chair back and walked toward a cabinet, rummaging inside until she found a box and pulled it out. "These are brand new, never contaminated by any biological samples you'd find worrying," she said, pulling out two beakers and showing them to him. "Would you like some water?"

A joke about her, of all people, going against lab protocol like this, nearly made it to his lips before he rethought it and decided against it. Instead, he looked up and nodded at her, then watched as she carefully filled each beaker at the sink in the lab.

"Thanks," he told her, as she handed one to him once she returned to their makeshift dinner table. He held his breath, wondering if that mundane exchange would lead to one of them summoning up the courage to start an actual conversation, or if they'd go back to slightly uncomfortable silence.

"I think your idea is a good one," Simmons began, and he could hear her fighting to sound normal through the slight nervous shake in her voice. "The headset, I mean, and the program you proposed to audit the readings. I hadn't thought of it, but it's good for Reach to have a way to self-monitor while she's learning to control her powers."

"We should document that work you're doing to objectively measure pain response," he added, deflecting her attempt to compliment him for his small (and as-yet, uncompleted) contribution when she was the one making progress toward an actual scientific breakthrough. "I skimmed that study about the pain signature trials when it was published and I don't recall their findings being as sophisticated as what you were able to accomplish with the concept earlier today."

"I just wanted to find some way to help," she whispered, her fork hovering in the air over her plate. "I know how important this is to you." Her words were simple but everything about her body language screamed that each one was costing her something, that there was something painful about them. He couldn't be sure, though. Perhaps it was just about being with him and trying to find a way to interact with him again that she found so difficult. It killed him that she was nearly impossible for him to read, after they'd spent so long implicitly understanding each other.

"It's important to all of us," he noted, desperately wanting her to elaborate about why she thought it was important to him in particular. They'd ruined so much between them by not talking to each other, but he couldn't just offer up the information she was fishing for, not without it sounding like an incredibly odd thing to say out of the blue.

"I just mean…" she began, struggling to express herself. She'd seemed hesitant before to talk about the quick attachment he and Reach had formed, but now she seemed awkwardly determined to extract some sort of answer from him about it. "Anyone can see how much she relies on you."

"She's frightened," he answered, shrugging. "I just happened to be on the extraction team and she needed to trust someone."

"What about you?" Simmons asked, her voice even and calm as she stared determinedly downward instead of meeting his eyes.

"What _about_ me?" he asked, wanting her to define exactly what she was asking before he gave her an answer. He'd been clear with her when he'd asked her if she was in love with Will, and though it had hurt at the time, it had been the right way to ask. Though the finality of her answer had been awful to hear, it was what he needed to know and the lack of ambiguity had been a perverse comfort to him after wondering about it for so long. If Simmons was going to work herself up to ask him what he suspected she was trying to figure out, she would never believe the answer unless she asked the question as plainly as he'd put it to her, all those weeks ago.

"You're usually so much more guarded than this," she said, dancing around the topic yet again. "I don't know that I've ever seen you...befriend someone so quickly before." She fixed him with a look that had more significance than her words seemed to indicate. "Perhaps when we met Daisy...I suppose you opened up to her quite quickly as well."

He looked down at his plate and stabbed some vegetables, refusing to look up as he considered what she was saying. He knew his fleeting crush on Daisy when they'd first met had been obvious to anyone around them, including Simmons. She was desperately trying to imply that his feelings for Reach were similar, and he swallowed back a frustrated growl that she wouldn't just ask him.

"You want to know if I'm falling in love with her?" he asked, piercing another bite of food and casually eating it when he was done speaking.

Simmons sat up straighter but gave no other indication that the frankness of his question had taken her by surprise.

"It's none of my business," she noted.

"That doesn't matter," he said. "Do you want to know?"

"I think it's important that you're careful," she said, dropping her fork and bracing herself on the table with both hands, staring resolutely down at her plate.

"Simmons, you aren't answering the question. Do you want to know if I'm falling in love with her?"

"No!" she said, her voice raised and trembling. "You don't have to say it. It's obvious to anyone who's seen the two of you—"

"Whatever it is you think you're seeing, it's not obvious. I care about her, but I'm not in love with her."

"You're not being honest with yourself, then. The way you look at her—"

"—Has nothing on the way I look at you. How I'll always look at you." He stood up, needing to have his feet under him for this. "I'm not in love with her, because I'm still in love with you."

A gasp escaped Simmons and she turned around, clutching her hand over her mouth. Fitz's chest heaved with breaths of panic at what he'd said. He'd never intended to impose the weight of his feelings on her ever again, not after learning that she loved Will. He knew it was selfish, that saying it would bring him the relief of not holding it in any longer, but it would cause her pain.

"Simmons, I…" he began, uselessly. There was no way to take back what he'd just said. The damage had been done.

"You can love two people at the same time," she said, her voice barely above a whisper. "I know that's true. Even when I gave up hope and knew I'd never see you again, even when I decided to let Will into my heart, you were always there as well. I never stopped loving you either. I still haven't."

"Jemma," he whispered, her first name feeling foreign in his mouth after he'd avoided it for so long.

Something about hearing him say it seemed to break her as well, as she began to sob in earnest, burying her face in her hands, her shoulders slumping in defeat.

"We can't do this," she said, gasping the words out between breaths she seemed unable to control. "All I do is hurt you. All you've ever done is help me, and I just make you worse."

"That's not true!"

"Really? Your recovery? You regressed every time I was in the same room with you. You didn't start to get better until I left. Then I got pulled through the portal and you went through hell to get me back. You do the impossible and actually succeed, and I come back here and make your life miserable talking about reopening the portal to rescue Will. What have I ever done but bring you pain?"

"We've hurt each other, Jemma, but that's 'cause we're human! My recovery was more difficult around you because you were the person I wanted to get better _for_. I folded under the pressure, but that's on me, not you. I was too impatient. I wanted to blink and be back to where we were and I got so frustrated when it wouldn't happen that I ended up taking it out on you and making you feel like it was your fault. And I haven't been miserable because I got you back from that godforsaken planet. I took all those chances to get you back because none of this matters to me without you. I'm broken because you're supposed to be broken when the person you will love for the rest of your life loves someone else, but it's not your fault. That's me, that's my selfishness. I can't quite make myself let go of the hope that we could be more than what we are."

"We can't do this," she said, squeezing her eyes shut and balling her fists at her sides. "I can't do this to you anymore. You need to forget about me and move on, and you can't do that while I'm here. I'll talk to Coulson. I'm sure he can arrange something."

"Jemma, no," he said, his voice hardening with fear that she would leave him for good, believing it was what was better for him. "I need you in my life. Maybe I haven't been clear that there's no pressure to—"

"You've been clear. You've been perfect. That's the problem."

"No. This has gone all wrong," he said, his heart pounding wildly out of control as she began to walk away from him. "We can talk this out. You can't go, not like this."

"I have to," she said, walking more quickly now as he chased behind her through the lab. 

"You can't," he said, pleading wordlessly with her to turn around.

"Stop following me," she said, not breaking stride as she tossed the words over her shoulder. "There's nothing left to discuss."

"Jemma!" he called after her, knowing it was useless. He wanted to follow her anyway but he knew it would only close her off further. He couldn't force her to talk...didn't want her to, if it was going to cause her this sort of pain. He watched her leave, helplessly, wishing he could take back the entire night. He'd pushed her, forced her into territory she wasn't ready to face, and he couldn't see how they could fix the damage it had done.

He paced, his mind whirring, looking for something he could say to her. Perhaps he could be the one to leave. She could stay here with her friends, safer under S.H.I.E.L.D. protection than she'd be on her own, and work on her recovery without him hanging over her. He knew she'd feel guilty, though, especially after everything he'd just told her.

That's when it came to him. Reach. The offer she'd made him to fix things for him, the one he'd known at the time was dangerous. Altering what had happened, looking for a better outcome, it was impossibly selfish. He'd known that the moment he heard Reach say the words.

If it was that or lose Jemma forever, though, how could he not at least try? He struggled with the idea for several long, frantic moments, wondering if he had any right to make a decision like this for both of them.

When he remembered the sight of her leaving him, refusing to turn around or talk to him, he let his feet carry him to Reach's room. She opened the door bare seconds after his knock, seeming unsurprised at the tears that were streaming down his face.

"I shouldn't have told you to do it," she said. "Taking her dinner. It was supposed to go well."

He angrily swept the tears away with his fingers, upset that she would blame herself when he had been the one to goad Jemma into a complete breakdown.

"Help me undo it," he begged, asking her before he could change his mind. He was hardly done talking before Reach grabbed his arms and he felt the nauseating pull of her power as it dismantled the damage he'd done in the past hour. He watched it all in reverse, every painful moment as he and Simmons had torn each other apart. He let it run back, past meeting Daisy in the hallway, past talking to Hunter in the mess. He wasn't sure how to break out of what she was showing him, but as soon as he had the thought that he was far enough back to fix things, he found himself standing in the pantry closet of the mess again, holding a bag of dry beans.

He blinked a few times, choking back the urge to be sick as he acclimated himself. When he felt more stable again, he turned toward the footsteps he could hear coming up behind him.

"Evening mate," Hunter said with a grin. "Mind if I—"

"It's all yours," Fitz said, turning to the side and letting Hunter in past him. "I'll grab something later. I'm meant to be in the lab now anyway."

Before Hunter could say anything else, Fitz turned and left, heading toward the lab. He resolved to work with Simmons and avoid any talk of anything other than the headset and the monitoring program. He knew taking a second chance at this was wrong, that he'd robbed Simmons of something by taking this reset. It was completely unethical, but it was his only chance to keep her from leaving.

If he kept telling himself that, perhaps he'd even be able to believe it wasn't simply the most selfish thing he'd ever done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know, I know! Fitz did a Very Bad Thing. I've been so hesitant to update and finalize this part, but it's the first of two really hard decisions I've made about the plot of this story and I think it's important to stick to both of them. Rest assured that Fitz knows what he's done is at least in an ethical grey area, and you all know he would never do anything like that without making amends somehow.
> 
> Try not to be too angry at him for it, though. Things were really messed up. :\


	10. The Reset

Fitz peeked into the mess, slinking inside when he found it deserted. He was mentally and physically exhausted, but too hungry from skipping dinner to try to go to sleep yet. It had been several long and uncomfortable hours in the lab with Simmons, but they finally had a working prototype of the EEG headset and an alpha revision of Fitz's monitoring program.

He also had a terrible headache, paired with a sinking feeling that the evening had still done some damage to his relationship with Simmons. He'd poured his energy into avoiding, as deftly and subtly as possible, every attempt she'd made to talk about anything other than the prototyping. He'd wanted to prevent the disaster that his first attempt at the evening had become before Reach had reset things for him, but she clearly seemed frustrated and confused by his behavior. Still, his nebulous feeling that she was a little disconcerted with where they stood with one another was leagues better than the original end to the evening.

Fitz heard a noise behind him and whirled around, hoping Simmons hadn't decided to get something to eat before bed as well. He was relieved to find Daisy peering into the refrigerator, apparently looking for a late-night snack. He didn't know if she'd noticed him there, so he made a little noise in an attempt to announce his presence without startling her.

"Hey," she answered, pulling a container open and sniffing the contents before wrinkling her nose and putting it back.

"Good news about May," Fitz offered, yawning a bit as he contemplated snack choices for himself.

"Who told you?" Daisy asked, and Fitz immediately felt like a prize idiot. He'd never had the conversation about Daisy soliciting May's help with Reach, not in this version of the day.

"No one," he stammered, his mind racing to find an explanation. He couldn't imagine admitting to Daisy that he'd been selfish enough to risk Reach's safety by soliciting her help for his own gain. "You mentioned that you'd like to bring her in to help Reach. If she thinks she can really help, she'd never refuse, would she?"

"Yeah, of course she wouldn't," Daisy said, speaking slowly as though she was evaluating what he'd said. "I've asked her to show Reach all the meditation and focus exercises she's shown me. They'll start tomorrow morning." Daisy smirked a little. "Should have seen Reach's face when I told her May would be by at 5:00 am. I think she thought I was kidding at first."

Fitz sucked in a breath and made what he hoped was a comical face, trying to camouflage his expression from betraying the riot of thoughts jangling around in his head. Daisy was pretty good at reading him, so he'd need to be careful if he was to avoid any more uncomfortable conversations for the rest of the day.

"Simmons and I have a prototype headset and a primary revision on a monitoring program. We'll start dialing in the settings and making the necessary adjustments the next time we have another session with her. Just let us know when."

"You got it," Daisy said, followed by a little noise of triumph when she found something she liked in a tupperware container at the back of the fridge. She pulled it out and then looked at Fitz. "Did you want some company? I was just going to eat in my quarters, but—"

"—I think I'm too tired," he said. "Thanks, though."

"I'm pretty tired too," she conceded. "None of us have been getting much sleep lately."

Fitz grabbed something almost at random, figuring he could choke just about anything down. When he looked at it more closely, he saw it was Mack's container of brown rice, full to the brim instead of the mostly empty container he and Hunter had left in the previous version of this evening's events. He put it back, wondering if Hunter had properly apologized to Bobbi after Fitz's reset or if his impulsive decision to take a second chance had robbed Bobbi and Hunter of their apology dinner.

One thing was clear. He couldn't ask Reach to do this again, not unless someone's life was on the line or there was some similarly dire consequence that had to be averted. Now that he'd had time to think about what he'd done, he couldn't stop worrying that they might have changed something he had no right to meddle with. 

With a quick nod of his head at Daisy, he slipped out of the mess and walked to his quarters as directly as possible. He couldn't imagine facing anyone else that day, at least until after he got some sleep.

* * *

Fitz awoke the next morning later than he'd have liked, as the morning was passing into early afternoon. He knew he'd needed the sleep and that anyone on the team who really needed him would have called without hesitation, but it felt irresponsible all the same.

He rushed through a shower and pulled on some clothes, running his hand self-consciously over the hair that still felt too short to him as he set out for the lab. He wanted to grab the headset and get some baseline readings with Reach and he hoped he could catch Simmons and get her to come with him. She had jumped entirely to the wrong conclusions about his friendship with Reach and the most direct way he could think of to set Simmons right was to give her the opportunity to spend time with both of them and see for herself.

He'd be lying, though, if it wasn't also because he terribly missed just being with her, the two of them working together. He desperately wanted her presence to feel normal and natural to him again, even if the path to that was complicated and difficult.

As he left his quarters and began the the walk to the lab, he thought about the conversation he'd wiped out last night. Of the many things he now felt guilty about, one of the most troubling things was the sheer amount of information he'd found out from Simmons that she was now utterly unaware that he knew. He felt as though he'd left her vulnerable, and if he'd ever found out anyone else had treated her this way, he'd have been incandescent with rage. 

He catalogued the details of his unfair advantage, resolved to do something to make amends. He knew now that she believed she'd made him worse during his recovery and continued to cause him pain ever since. He'd tried to help her see that his own frustrations and unreasonable expectations deserved the lion's share of the blame, but she hadn't believed him. She'd also told him she loved him, even through her time with Will, but he knew she wouldn't have admitted that if he hadn't practically taunted her to ask him if he was falling for Reach. Worst of all, Simmons seemed sure he would be better off moving forward without her.

He shouldn't know any of those things, not until Simmons was more ready to have the conversation. Things were now unbalanced between them and he couldn't allow that to continue. They'd spent years debating each other and constantly butting heads, but working in seamless harmony despite that, or perhaps even because of it. No matter how difficult things had ever been between them, he knew they regarded each other as equals. He _would_ make this right with her, no matter what it took.

When he reached the lab, Simmons was sitting quietly, leafing through one of the many books they'd brought in to research the origins of the monolith. As soon as he saw her, he felt ridiculous for assuming she'd be available to assist him with Reach's first use of their prototype. He should have anticipated that he'd be interrupting her as she worked on their project to bring home Will.

By the time he reached her, he'd rethought his plan entirely. He slid into the chair opposite her and ducked his head, trying to catch her attention as she continued to read.

"How can I help?" he asked, keeping his expression neutral even when hers fell.

"Oh, Fitz," she began, "I haven't found much of anything. I'm sure you—"

"If you haven't found anything, that just means another set of eyes might help us find it faster. Which of these would you like me to start with?" he asked, silently begging her to accept his help.

"You're needed elsewhere, Fitz," she said, her voice on edge.

"Has someone come here looking for me?" he asked, playing dumb. He knew that's not what she meant, but he was desperately looking for some way to keep the conversation going. He had to show her how wrong he'd been to pull back from her, that it had made things harder and darker for him instead of easier. Diving back into the project that meant so much to her might begin to convince her, or so he hoped.

"Actually, yes. Daisy and May came by a few hours ago to ask about the prototype. I gave them an update, but I'm sure Daisy would like to get your assessment. She hopes to bring Reach onto her team of Inhumans and she and Lincoln will need your help when they meet with Coulson again."

"I'll check in with Daisy, but that doesn't mean I can't work with you. I'm not leaving you alone on this, not anymore," he said, insistently. When she didn't answer right away, he took a chance and pushed a little harder. "I know haven't been handling things well, Simmons, and I'm sorry." 

She looked upset for several long moments as Fitz held his breath. If everything went wrong between them today, he couldn't be so weak again to ask Reach to wipe it out for him.

"I don't...I didn't...blame you, Fitz. I'm so glad you have something constructive to work toward. I can't imagine dragging you back into this."

"I want what you want," he insisted, getting up and moving quickly to drop down into the chair next to hers. "I know you have to find out if we can rescue him, if he's okay. You haven't done anything wrong. I'm sorry I made you feel as though you had."

She closed the book in front of her and pushed it away, locking her eyes onto his and his stomach lurched when he saw the tears beginning to spill over her cheeks. She looked so worn and he hated the thought that he had been part of making her feel this way.

"I've done nothing but get things wrong. Every decision, none of them have come out the way I intended. Nothing has happened the way I thought it would," she whispered, her voice shaky.

He made sure to hold her gaze, looking, unblinking, into her eyes. "I don't agree, Simmons, but I don't want to argue. None of what's happened before matters to me now. I want us to move forward and just see where that takes us. I want to do that with the two of us working together, as we used to. Everything else...we can figure that out as we go along."

"You _should_ start again, Fitz," she said, managing a smile through her tears. "That's what I've been wanting to tell you."

"What...without you?"

"I don't think either of us is planning on leaving S.H.I.E.L.D., Fitz, so not entirely. If you wanted to focus your energy elsewhere..." she trailed off, her voice breaking a little, but she swallowed and continued, "...I wanted to make sure you know that I'd understand. I can't ask for your help with the portal any longer."

He tried not to let the frustration overcome him, forcing himself to stay even in an attempt to keep the conversation from spiraling out of control. "I've given you no reason to believe it lately, but I want to help you do this."

"I'm not sure I want to endanger anyone else. I'm not sure anyone should continue, really. The few leads I've found haven't led to anything positive. If there's an answer here, it's likely to cause even more damage than has already been done. It may not be possible to justify the risk."

"That doesn't sound like you haven't found any answers," Fitz said, his thoughts already ahead of his words. "It sounds like you found answers that you don't like."

"It all sounds like fairy tales and myth," she said, shoving the pile of books near her away in disgust. "I hate to admit it, but I saw many things that weren't logical while I was on the planet, so I can't afford to discount any of it. Even in the strangest, most fanciful accounts with possible references to the monolith, there could be a grain of truth. All of them promise disaster, destruction, and death. When I think of what you unknowingly risked just to get me back—"

"— _Just_ to get you back? I _had_ to get you back. That's what I'm trying to tell you. I understand how badly you need to do the same for Will."

"Oh, Fitz. You don't understand at all. How could I expect you to, when I don't understand it myself?"

"Maybe I don't understand, but I'm trying to. I'll keep trying until we work it out."

"I really do need you, Fitz," she said, her voice barely audible. "I just don't think it's fair that I do."

"Don't even think about that. Whatever you need. We'll keep trying," he promised.

She turned in her chair and placed her shaking, hesitant hand over his heart. He pulled her in closer with his arm around her shoulders and she laid her cheek over her hand, burrowing her head under his chin.

"I don't know what's going to happen," she whispered into his shirt, and his arm tightened around her for a moment as the fear seemed to settle in around them. 

"It doesn't matter," he answered, believing what he was saying a little more with every word. "It doesn't matter as long as we face it together. I'm here for you, Simmons. No matter what."

"I'm so tired, Fitz," she said, her voice dreamy and light.

"Of course you are," he said, wondering how long it had been since she'd been able to get a decent night's sleep. "You should get some rest."

"In the middle of the day?" she scoffed, but he could still hear the fatigue in her voice.

"How many hours have you been up out of the last twenty four? Or forty eight? No one here would begrudge you rest right now, if you need it." She hesitated for a moment, but then he could feel the tension begin to drain from her shoulders as she sagged against him. "Would you like me to come with you? I could sit by the door, they way I did when you first got back. I wouldn't mind."

"I think I'll be all right on my own," she said, her voice a little stronger as she pulled back to look at him. "Perhaps everything will seem clearer after some rest." Fitz pulled away as well and she stood up.

"Sleep well, Simmons."

She paused for a moment, after she'd taken a few steps away from him. "Can you wait for me, before you start the first trial with the headset? I'll understand if you think it's too vital to delay. It's just...it's the first project we've been able to work on together in so long and—"

"—I need your help with it," he said. "I don't understand the biometrics well enough to calibrate the monitoring software. And I'd just rather have you there, as well," he admitted, earning a smile from her before she left.


	11. Baseline

It was five hours later when Simmons reappeared in the lab, wearing fresh clothes and looking more alive and awake than he could remember her seeming in weeks. 

"Have you had a chance to speak with Daisy?" she asked, walking toward him.

He smiled as he realized this was an old pattern of theirs that they were now hopefully falling back into for good. For years at the Academy and Sci-Ops, sometimes one of them would get too tired to continue while they were plugging away at a project and the other would stay in the lab and keep working. The moment they were together again, one of them would ask a question that picked up right where they left off and it was though they'd never spent a moment apart.

"Yes," he confirmed, setting aside the article he'd been trying to concentrate on enough to absorb it, to no avail. "And May as well. Their first session with Reach went quite well this morning, it seems."

Simmons frowned a little. "Reach may be too exhausted for us to begin a complete first test, but perhaps we could get some at-rest statistics? As we're dealing with the variables that come with Inhuman physiology, I believe it would be safer to start with a broad base of expected values."

Fitz nodded, feeling energized at how clear-headed and even Simmons sounded, how driven she was to get started. He'd be thankful even if this was the only part of their relationship they ever got back; not just the ability to work together, but genuine mutual excitement about what they could accomplish as partners. He wouldn't be happy, exactly, but thankful was better than nothing.

When Simmons picked up the tablet and looked at him expectantly, he picked up the headset and followed her out of the lab. Fitz couldn't think of anything in particular to say and he didn't want to take the chance of breaking the delicate accord he and Simmons had come to, so he spent the walk nervously fiddling with series of straps he'd added to the headset to make the fit adjustable. When they got to Reach's room, Simmons knocked on the door, jumping back a little when Reach opened it right away. 

"I don't care what you're here to do, I'm so glad you're here. Daisy loaned me a couple of books and I figured out how to get the television feeds on that monitor, but I've been so bored since this morning!" Reach grinned at them, practically vibrating with excitement at having company.

"We were concerned you'd be tired from your session with Agent May this morning, so we allowed you time to rest," Simmons said, a bit formally. "We were hoping you might feel up to trying out this prototype monitoring gear."

"What does it do?" Reach asked, craning her neck to look at the headset as Fitz made a few last minute adjustments to it.

"This will automate the data gathering and analysis of your brain activity as you continue to learn how to control your abilities," Simmons explained, holding her hand out for the headset. Fitz exchanged it for the tablet Simmons was holding.

"What does the tablet do?" Reach asked, looking up as Simmons put the headset in place on Reach's head and began to adjust the straps, making sure the sensors were correctly placed.

"The program on this tablet will collect data for later study, but I've also added a rudimentary algorithm that should alert us to any abnormalities that arise during data collection." Fitz paused for a moment, and Simmons took over seamlessly. 

"The program is quite robust. Fitz has programmed it to catalogue a complete snapshot of all available data for each out of range event, which will allow us to work with you, Daisy, and Lincoln to refine your body's autonomic response during each application of your ability." Simmons leaned over Reach's shoulder to smile reassuringly.

Fitz continued to watch Simmons for a moment after she was done speaking, further relishing their return to working together. When he finally tore his eyes away, he noticed Reach trying as hard as she could to communicate complete exasperation without moving, as Simmons was still making final adjustments to the headset.

"I'm glad the two of you seem to have everything under control here, but if you're going to talk to me about it, could you use...I don't know...smaller words? Not all of us paid attention in school," Reach said, and though there was impatience in her voice, Fitz could see her looking between the two of them with something like amused fascination.

"It watches your EEG—your brain wave patterns we measure with that headset—for anything that might indicate a problem," Simmons explained. "If we see any patterns that might be harmful to you, and especially if it detects anything of the pain signature I was watching for during your tests yesterday, the program will alert you and collect all the data we'll need to analyze to help you avoid the same outcome in the future."

Fitz sat in the chair next to where Reach was sitting. "There's a sliding scale you can use to self-report during any future tests as well. You just record the level of discomfort here," he said, holding up the tablet and showing her the slider, "and we can use it to fine-tune the automatic detection algorithm." 

"You put a frowny face on one side and a smiley face on the other," Reach said, leaning closer to the tablet after Simmons finished with the adjustments to the headset.

"The iconography might need a bit of work," he conceded.

"If you change one pixel on these faces, I'll refuse to use it," Reach declared. "I'm naming them Betty and Bernard."

Simmons finished tightening the last strap, pressed a button on the center back of the headset, and the tablet's screen burst to life with data. Heart rate, respiration, and other incidental vital sign readings scrolled through one section while an EEG waveform blipped across the top, turning green after a few cycles.

"The monitor uses a simple green-yellow-red color coding to report status at a glance. You're at rest at the moment, so we're seeing solid green across the board. We need you to avoid using your powers at all for this first period of data collection to help us establish a baseline," Fitz explained.

Reach responded by stretching her arm out over the tablet and pushing the slider over to the happy face icon. "I think I can lay off for a few minutes." 

The three of them stood in the room in a suddenly uncomfortable silence, none of them sure what to say or do if they weren't actively testing Reach's powers.

"Have you taken the acetaminophen tablets that I left with you? The pain reliever?" Simmons asked, looking relieved to find something to say to interrupt the quiet.

"Oh, I did," Reach said, frowning a little. "It's been a little boring in here sometimes, so I made sort of a pathetic game out of taking them exactly at the times you suggested. Is that going to mess up the test?"

"Actually, we want readings as free of any trace of pain signature as possible, so it's preferable that you continued to take them on schedule. Have they helped?" Simmons asked.

"Haven't felt even a twinge," Reach answered, then elaborated, "Except when I was using my powers. Even then, my misfires weren't as painful as they were before."

"During your session with Daisy?" Simmons asked, leaning over Fitz's shoulder to peer at the readings on the tablet.

Reach stole a glance at Fitz, but looked back at the tablet quickly. "They had me try some of the focus exercises this morning that have worked for Daisy, and I did a few practice runs. Nothing huge—Daisy wanted the whole team of people trying to help me not kill myself with this thing there if I did anything big."

Fitz bit his lip thoughtfully, hearing in Reach's answer what Simmons had hopefully missed. It hadn't been a complete answer, but everything she'd said was truthful. To protect him, Reach had left out any mention of the reset she'd granted him. When he thought back to the nausea he'd felt when she'd thrust him into the past, he realized she must have hurt herself doing it and he felt even worse than he already did about what he'd asked of her.

The tablet flashed yellow in his hands and he and Reach looked at each other. Overcome with this wave of regret for what he'd done, he put his hand over Reach's in silent apology. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Simmons flinch and heard her quiet, hurt-sounding intake of breath.

Simmons recovered quickly, asking Reach about the blip in the readings with a detached, clinical tone.

"Sorry, it's a really hard habit to break. I peeked forward a little before I could stop myself." She pulled her hand out from under Fitz's and he sat back quickly, returning both hands to the tablet. "It's my fault, sorry. Maybe we could talk about something else? It's easier to resist doing it if there's something to distract me."

Fitz couldn't think of anything neutral enough to start a conversation, so he sighed with relief when Simmons began to speak, after one last beat of silence.

"There's an agent here...I'm not sure if you've met. Agent Morse?" Simmons began, waiting for an acknowledgement either way before continuing.

Reach looked confused for a moment, until Fitz remembered a way she would be familiar with Bobbi.

"When we found you in that cabin, the woman you said was 'outside kicking ass'? That's Agent Morse," he explained, enjoying the look of recognition and smile on Reach's face once she remembered.

"Agent Morse has been working on combat readiness with the Inhumans on Daisy's team. She expressed some interest in training with you as well, if you'd like," Simmons told her, looking briefly between Reach and the display on the tablet in Fitz's hands. "Daisy mentioned you may consider joining the team, and if you do, you'll need field training."

'Wow, you mean...like, hand to hand combat?" Reach looked a little overwhelmed, and when Fitz checked the readings, he could see her pulse rate spiking.

"I know it sounds daunting, but you'd be surprised how far a few simple techniques can carry you," Fitz said, trying to reassure her. "I was pretty useless in combat even after our initial training at the academy, but Agent Morse managed to show me a few things to help me defend myself."

"I saw. You took down one of those guys really well in one of those escapes from the cabin that didn't work." Reach clapped her hand over her mouth, looking at Fitz in alarm.

"It's all right," Fitz reassured her. "I mentioned to Simmons that you used your powers to help us all escape in one piece when we came to find you." 

"Agent Morse also mentioned that she may be able to tap into some surveillance for you, if there's anyone you'd like to check in on. It would be one way only, I'm afraid. Daisy's already talked to you about how dangerous it would be for you to directly contact anyone in the outside world, for now, at least?"

Reach nodded, her expression hardening. "There's no one out there I'm worried about. My dad took off when I was a baby. Mom died right after I finished high school. After that, it's just been a series of dead-end jobs and asshole boyfriends before this Inhuman abilities thing happened to me. I'm sort of a loser, huh? I disappear from the world and I can't think of a single person who'd give a shit."

"My mum's the only one who'd need to know if something happened to me," Fitz offered, trying to make her feel better. He wondered if Reach had seen from her looks into his past that he'd also grown up without his father, and if that similarity had helped her to trust him. It was strange, and unfair to her when he thought about it, that Reach knew so much about him when he'd found out so little about her. "I'm sorry to hear about your mum," he said, frowning at how awkward he sounded, but he couldn't let what she'd told them pass without trying to say something.

"It was a long time ago, I'm over it," Reach said, but when he glanced down, he saw that her heart rate had continued to climb alongside a rise in the rest of her vital signs. "It was one of those shitty jobs that got me into this mess, actually," she added, abruptly changing the subject. "I was working at one of those holistic health food/supplements stores and the owner used to push samples on us whenever she thought we looked less than energetic. Daisy said it was fish oil tablets that caused me to change. That same lady fired me right after that when my dickhead boyfriend got drunk and hid the car keys before I had to go to work. Bet she doesn't know how much she screwed me over with that fish oil, does she?"

Reach's vitals continued to betray the distress she was trying to hide, the display turning yellow again in Fitz's hands.

"Reach, are you—" Fitz began, but he was cut off.

"—I'm not, I promise," Reach told him, her eyes widening as she looked back at him, helplessly. "I'm not doing anything," she said, gasping between each word as she struggled to talk. "It feels like..." she broke off, clutching her chest with both hands. "I feel like I'm having a heart attack." 

"Simmons," Fitz said, unnecessarily, as Jemma was already moving to crouch in front of Reach. "Is it possible her powers are...I don't know...involuntary?" he said, panicked enough to throw out any wild theory he could think of to help them figure out what was going on.

"It's not your powers, is it?" Simmons asked, taking Reach's hands. Reach looked down at their joined hands in alarm and tried to pull away, but Simmons wouldn't let go. "I don't think this has anything to do with your abilities. I know it's scary, but you're in no danger. Try to breathe with me."

Reach's face crumpled and she began to cry. Simmons leaned forward, somehow getting her arms around Reach despite the awkward angle, and Fitz blinked in disbelief at how quickly things had gone south.

"You're having a panic attack. You can get through this. You'll be all right." Jemma's voice was soothing and low. 

"I can't—" Reach gasped, starting to speak but finding it difficult to get the words out. "I don't know why I'm freaking out."

"I want to be clear. If you never want to use your powers again, or you decide you don't want to join Daisy's team, we'll still help you," Simmons said, the words muffled as Reach tightened the hug. "I will, Fitz will. All of us. Now try to breathe with me. Concentrate on matching my breaths."

Fitz stood up, watching helplessly as Simmons lowered her voice until he couldn't make out the words anymore, her hand rubbing absent-mindedly on Reach's shoulder as their breathing began slowly to sync. When it seemed to be over, Simmons patiently waited to pull away until Reach relaxed her arms first. 

"How did you know?" Reach asked, and Simmons didn't answer, ducking her head and looking away before she got to her feet. "I guess you're a doctor, right? So you knew what was happening to me?"

Fitz knew immediately that there was no biology lecture Simmons had attended or book she'd ever read that had helped her recognize a panic attack so quickly. She was able to see it because she'd had them herself after her return from the other planet, and was probably still having them. She'd been without anyone who could really help guide her through the difficulties she was facing after Dr. Garner had been revealed as Lash. She'd barely been able to talk to Fitz about any of it, and that had been before he'd shut her out.

"If you feel this way again, try to remember to breathe through it. Focus on the idea that it will pass. Don't hesitate to call for help, if you can. Daisy showed you how to operate the communication panel?" Reach nodded, and Simmons continued. "This is an overwhelming thing happening to you. Let yourself remember that this is a completely natural response to something this life-changing."

"You wanted to ask me something," Reach said, calmer now as she looked at Simmons with obvious gratitude. "I didn't read you," she added, stammering a little. The words were a little jumbled together in the aftermath of what she'd just experienced.

"I don't—" Simmons began, but Reach cut her off once she began to recover a little more.

"Not about this, not about helping me. Something for you. There's something you want to know and you're afraid to ask me. It's okay if you do. If there's a chance I can tell you what you need to know, I'd like to try." Simmons just stared back, stunned into silence. "Even before I changed, I was pretty good at reading people. I didn't use my power on you just now, I swear."

"I believe you," Simmons said, speaking so slowly and guardedly that Fitz knew Reach was right. There was clearly something Simmons wanted to ask her, and it didn't take more than a moment's consideration for Fitz to realize what it was.

She wanted to know if they would be able to rescue Will, if he had survived their showdown with the thing that shared the planet with them, when it attacked just as Fitz and the team opened the portal that brought Simmons home.

"I can't ask you for that," Simmons said, slipping immediately back into detached clinician mode.

"I have to practice somehow. We won't know that I can control this power unless I try to use it, right? That's what these sessions with Daisy and all the rest of you are? Come tomorrow morning when Agent May is here and ask me then."

"No," Simmons said, quickly refusing again. "Thank you, but no."

"If you change your mind…"

"You can't tell me about the future, not really," Simmons began, the words rushing out of her in a nervous torrent. "It's not that I doubt what I've seen myself of your ability, and I certainly trust Fitz when he says he's seen you make alterations to the recent past as well. I don't think it's possible to know something about your own future without that knowledge changing events." Simmons looked to Fitz for help when she was done speaking, and he felt a bit sick. He knew it was true, that the things he knew were still changing everything around him. 

"I think I understand, but if you were really careful…" Reach said, trailing off as she appeared to be thinking over what Simmons was saying.

"When you shine a light on something to study it, that light could change the way it behaves," Simmons explained. "Your ability is extraordinary, Reach. I appreciate the offer, but I can't accept."

Reach nodded, looking down at her hands, now clasped in her lap. "Do you think Daisy would have some time to talk to me? It's not that the two of you aren't—"

"—I'll find her for you," Fitz said, already tapping on his phone before he finished speaking. Daisy responded right away to say she was on the way, and Fitz relayed the message to a thankful looking Reach.

"I'm sorry I screwed up the readings you wanted," Reach mumbled. 

Fitz looked at her sitting quietly in the chair, looking smaller and younger to him somehow as she worried her lower lip between her teeth, wringing her hands in her lap.

"We got everything we needed," Simmons answered. "And even if we hadn't, you've done nothing wrong." She looked between Reach and Fitz, her understanding smile faltering a bit. "I should go, Fitz, if you can stay until Daisy's able to get here?"

"No, I'll be fine," Reach insisted, but even though she was trying to sound confident, it was clear that it was mostly an act. "You can both go. Daisy will be here soon."

Fitz rushed to Simmons, who was already halfway toward the door. He leaned in to speak quietly to her, though he wasn't sure why. He didn't mind if Reach overheard what he was about to say. "I really need to talk to you. Where will you be?"

"I can be in the lab if you need me to—"

"—It's nothing that will require us to be in the lab," he said, interrupting her before he lost his nerve.

"I'll be in my quarters," she said, slowly, the crinkling of her nose and the narrowing of her eyes giving away her confused curiosity. They held each other's gaze for a long moment until Simmons turned away, leaving quietly and shutting the door carefully behind her.

"You're going to tell her, aren't you?" Reach asked, still sitting almost motionless in her chair.

"I have to," Fitz told her. "I'll make sure she knows it wasn't your fault."

"You think I care about that?" Reach asked, the fire returning to her voice a little. "You really love her, don't you?"

"More than…" he began, shaking his head when he couldn't think of an adequate way to communicate it. "I can't even say how much."

"Will she forgive you?" Reach asked, giving voice to the fears coursing through Fitz's thoughts.

"Doesn't matter," he shrugged. "I have to try to fix it."

"Fitz, the fix-it man," Reach whispered, and he laughed ruefully at this echo of one of the first things Reach ever said to him.

He sat next to her, both of them silent until Daisy arrived.


	12. Reckoning

Fitz walked away from Reach's room, trying not to shudder when he remembered what Daisy had said to him as he got up to leave once she'd arrived. The words rang in his ears. 'Jeez, Fitz. You look like a dead man walking.' It was an echo from the evening he and Reach had wiped out, a reminder of another conversation that had never really happened.

He was fidgeting with his hands even more than usual, making him wonder what he usually did with his arms that didn't feel as awkward as everything he was self-consciously trying now. He tried to even himself out, slow down the frenetic movements of his body that betrayed the riot of confusion jangling around in his mind, but he wasn't finding much success.

He'd taken the long way to get to Simmons, and as he passed by the gym he saw Hunter inside, beating the hell out of a punching bag. Fitz sighed, knowing Hunter well enough to understand that this clearly meant he hadn't managed to work things out with Bobbi. Fitz didn't want to make Simmons wait, but he felt obligated to at least check in on Hunter to see how far off track things were with him.

Fitz was halfway into the room before he realized he didn't have any pretext for being there. He hadn't really thought through his approach, and with so much else on his mind, he wasn't coming up with one very quickly. That, more than anything else, made Fitz decide to dive straight in, head first.

"All right, Hunter," Fitz began. "Why haven't you apologized to Bobbi yet?"

Mack, who'd been silently lifting weights in the corner of the room, suddenly began to snicker. He was clearly trying to hold it back, but was rapidly losing the battle. What began as a chuckle was turning into what could only be described as a guffaw. For his part, Hunter didn't seem particularly amused, either at Fitz's question or at Mack's reaction.

"What makes you think Bob and I are on the outs, huh?" Hunter spat out, as he threw a series of particularly ungainly punches at the bag. "We aren't connected at the hip, you know. Just because she isn't here…" Hunter continued, but his shoulders began to drop, his bravado disappearing. When he threw a punch that missed the bag entirely, forcing him to stumble forward, Fitz moved between Hunter and the punching bag to steady his friend, pulling him away for the two of them to sit on a nearby bench.

"Don't think I've ever seen you train with the bag," Fitz offered. "Usually it's sparring, isn't it? Didn't you say it was deadly boring to fight against an inanimate object?"

"Yeah, that's why I can't train with _her_ anymore. The woman's as immovable as a mountain. Bloody hellbeast," he ended, muttering under his breath.

"I don't think you mean that," Fitz told him, putting his hands out to stop Hunter's oncoming tirade. "Is there a possibility that you may owe Bobbi an apology for whatever this mess is about?"

"Owe _her_ an apology! You've got to be joking!" Hunter practically roared. "If anyone owes anyone else an apology it's—"

"—You," Mack interrupted. "Don't waste Fitz's time with the whole story, man, but you know it was mostly your fault."

"It wasn't...I didn't even...I can't be expected to…" Hunter ranted, but his body language suggested he was coming around to what his friends were trying to tell him, his shoulders relaxing, his balled-up fists opening, and the angry red shading his face beginning to drain away.

"And…" Fitz began, trailing off to make sure he had Hunter's full attention before he continued. "If she apologizes first, you'll feel like a wanker."

Hunter's eyes widened. "Ugh, if she apologizes first, she'll feel like she's won. Always such a bloody adult, treating me like a child."

"Well, when you act like—" Mack began, but he cut himself off with a laugh when Hunter turned to glower at him.

"Right," Hunter said, getting up to pace across the room, covering the ground quickly as he began to think. "Right. Yes. This is it. Thanks, Fitz," he said, making rather intense eye contact with Fitz as he said it, before turning to Mack. "And no thanks to you, Hercules, over there. You weren't bloody helpful at all."

"You're welcome," Mack and Fitz said, at the same time, and Hunter left the gym on a dead run.

"You're a good man, Turbo," Mack said, setting down the dumbbell and wiping it off with his towel. "I've been trying to talk some sense into him all day without getting anywhere."

Fitz shrugged, thinking back on how Hunter's situation was worse because of him, and didn't feel like a particularly good person.

"Hey, earth to Fitz," Mack said, and Fitz realized he hadn't answered, and had stood there quietly staring off into space instead. "Got something you need to talk about yourself?"

Fitz shook his head, unable to imagine how he could even begin to explain to Mack the complicated situation he'd gotten himself into.

"If you want to change your clothes, I could stick around and spot for you. There's something bothering you," Mack observed. "If you can't talk about it, maybe you could work it out that way."

"Thanks for the offer, but I know what I have to do. I'm just not...looking forward to it," Fitz admitted. He was surprised to feel a bit better after he saw the sympathetic look on Mack's face, but he couldn't put this off any longer. It was time to go.

"Take care of yourself, Turbo," Mack called after him, and Fitz waved back, over his shoulder. If he turned around, he might lose his nerve.

He walked faster after leaving Mack behind, heading straight for Simmons instead of stalling by wandering the Playground first. He was glad he'd been able to help put Hunter back on the right track, but he couldn't kid himself about how much he'd welcomed the opportunity to postpone their talk.

* * *

It took Simmons a minute to come to her door after he knocked, and she stared at him wordlessly for a moment before she opened the door wide enough for him to come in. She shut it carefully, brushing her hand upwards against the glossy paint as though she was contemplating it before she took a deep breath and turned around.

"Thanks for—" he began.

"I wanted to—" she said, overlapping him.

They both stopped speaking at the same time and he looked up at the ceiling, feeling a little tortured, trying to decide if he should let her start or if he was too likely to chicken out if he did.

"I'm sorry. _You_ asked to speak to _me_ ," she pointed out. "I should let you go first."

"I have to tell you something," he blurted out, knowing he just had to say it. "You're going to be angry with me, and you'll have every right to be. I wanted to apologize now, because I'm not sure you'll give me the chance to after I say what I came here to say."

Simmons sat heavily on the bed, one hand held to her stomach and the other behind her, clutching a fistful of her bedspread. "If it's what I think it is, Fitz, I don't have any right to be angry with you." She looked up at him, trying to look brave, but he could see the sadness and uncertainty in her eyes.

"You will have a right to be angry with me, because I've done something that's unfair to you and I can't let it stand any longer without telling you." He tried to imagine the next words he had to say, feeling his heart racing in his chest. "Please, just let me tell you, and try to remember how much I regret what I've done."

Simmons nodded, moving both hands to her knees and staring down at them, as though she was bracing herself for some sort of physical impact.

"We had an argument last night, you and I," he said, and he absorbed the look of confusion Simmons shot him. She opened her mouth to correct him, but he continued before she could, determined to get through this without any more stalling. "I know you don't remember it. You remember us creating the headset and the monitoring program, and that was all."

"That _is_ all that…" she said, but she trailed off, getting the faraway look in her eyes that she wore whenever she was putting together the solution to a problem. "Fitz, please don't tell me that—"

"—We had a terrible argument last night," he said, cutting her off and continuing before she could stop him again. "It ended badly, and I couldn't see any way to fix things between us. You were going to leave. Leave S.H.I.E.L.D., leave me, and it was entirely my fault. I goaded you, I pushed you to talk about things I don't think you're ready to talk about." His voice started to break on the last few words and he swallowed hard, trying to find a way to keep talking. He watched as the stunned look on her face began to harden, and his stomach felt like it was dropping out from beneath him. "You told me things I know you didn't want me to know, things I think you immediately regretted saying."

"And you went to Reach and asked her to erase it all," Simmons stated, her voice dead-sounding, which he realized was infinitely worse than anger the moment he heard it.

He nodded, forcing himself to keep eye contact with her, to own this incredibly unfair thing that he'd done. "I want to tell you what happened, put us on equal footing again. It isn't right that I remember all of it and you don't. Please let me do that. If you never want to speak to me again after that...I'll understand. This thing I did, it's unforgivable, I know."

"Did you tell me that you're in love with her? With Reach?" Simmons asked, looking shocked with herself that she'd managed to say it.

"You asked me that last night," he admitted. "You didn't believe me when I told you I'm not."

"I _don't_ believe you, Fitz. That's what I thought you came here to tell me tonight."

"I came here tonight to do what I should have done months ago. Years ago, really. I came here to be honest with you, Simmons. I have every expectation of walking out of here with you never wanting to so much as see me again, so you have to believe that I have no reason to lie to you."

"I don't see how it's possible that you aren't—"

"—It's a strange relationship," Fitz said, not wanting her to waste her time going down a path he knew wouldn't lead them anywhere. "Reach and me. I don't know that there's a word for it. She's been inside my head. She's seen practically my entire life, however it is that her abilities work. I know what it looks like to you, but you're wrong."

Simmons was already shaking her head, and he felt ill at the way it seemed so important to her to believe he was developing feelings for Reach. Perhaps she wanted him to, because it would make her feel less guilty about her feelings for Will. He couldn't pursue that with her right now, though, not when he had so much he still had to own up to himself.

"I've never seen you like this with anyone, Fitz."

"The only person I'm in love with is you," he said, unable to dance around it any longer. "Reach has seen it for herself and she would tell you the same thing. When we're alone, all she seems to do is worry that you and I won't be able to work things out with each other. She told me to bring you dinner in the lab last night, because from what she could see, things were supposed to go well. I'm the one who mucked things up, and that's why she gave me the reset. I wish I had her powers just for a minute so I could show you, and you'd be able to believe me."

"You're playing games with time and we don't have any understanding of what could go wrong," she told him.

"It was dangerous, stupid, reckless, and selfish," he offered, admitting the entirety of his failings. "It was wrong. I robbed you of something, which was inexcusable. I'll never do anything like it again." He took another deep breath, giving her time to let his admission sink in. "I also don't expect anything from you about what I said...how I feel about you. I know your heart belongs to Will, and you shouldn't feel any pressure—"

"—I am the leading authority on who my heart belongs to," she said, her voice taking on the tone she used when they vehemently disagreed about something in the lab, as though she was affronted that he would have the temerity to be incorrect about something in her presence. "What I had with Will came out of darkness and desperation. Out of giving up. When I think about wanting to rescue him, it's not because I can't bear to be without him. I feel guilty about being able to leave him behind so easily. The day you rescued me, when I heard your voice, I stopped thinking about anything else except how to get to you."

"Simmons, of _course_ you wanted to come home—"

"—I didn't just want to come home. I wanted to come home to you," she told him, and he could see the weight of her guilt settle over her as though it was a physical force, pushing down her shoulders and bowing her head.

"This is how I know I've pushed you too hard, that you aren't ready to have this conversation. If you were, you would see that no one could fault you for getting yourself to safety. If Will is half the man you describe him as, he might be disappointed for himself, but he'd never have expected you to miss the chance to come home because there wasn't time for both of you to get through the portal."

Simmons shook her head, as though these were arguments she couldn't allow herself to embrace. "How can you defend me?"

"I shouldn't have to," he insisted. "You shouldn't blame yourself. Simmons, we argued about this, too, about you taking far too much responsibility for things that aren't your fault."

"What do you mean?" she asked, wringing her hands in her lap.

"My recovery, how I was a disaster whenever you were around. That wasn't your fault. I know you think it was, but that was me."

"No," she said, shaking her head and rejecting the idea before he could explain what he meant. "I took the air, and I didn't swim fast enough. Everything that happened to you was my fault. Coulson ordered us to leave after we found the Bus, and I was the one who couldn't handle letting them go. It was my fault we got captured, and look what happened to you because of it."

Fitz let out a long stream of air while he tried to process what Simmons was saying and the depths to which she blamed herself for what had happened to him. 

"We both made the decision to continue to watch the Bus that day. If you hadn't suggested it, I would have. And once we were at the bottom of the ocean, you're were the only reason we were able to get out of there. I'd given up completely, before you woke up. You were the one who figured out that we could blow the window open with what we had. I couldn't make the swim up, not with my broken arm, and I didn't want you to even think of trying to drag me with you. I was afraid I'd get you killed if I didn't move fast enough to get you on your way before you tried to come up with some plan to save me as well. Lucky for me, you think even faster than I gave you credit for, and you saved both of us. And look how I repaid you, snapping at you at every chance when you were trying to help me during my recovery."

"No, I pushed you too hard," Simmons said, getting to her feet and pacing the length of the room while she spoke. "I wanted you back too much, I wanted the recovery over and behind us so I could stop worrying that I'd failed you, that I hadn't gotten you to safety in time."

"We were both impatient," he insisted. "I heard the doctors tell me how long my rehabilitation would take, but I didn't believe them. How many times have the two of us done something in half the time everyone else thought we could? We were Ph.D candidates before everyone else our age was out of high school, youngest students at S.H.I.E.L.D. Academy. I heard them telling me to be patient, I was just too bloody smug about being able to do better than that, and then I was frustrated and angry when it didn't work out that way." He looked down at the floor, knowing how much he'd taken out that frustration on Simmons. "You got the worst of it. I'm surprised you didn't leave sooner than you did."

"I shouldn't have left you, Fitz. I just didn't know what to do. I'd hear from someone else about the progress you were making, and then I'd show up and it would all just fall apart. I was poison to you."

"Please believe me, Simmons. I wanted to be better for you so badly. That's the only reason I regressed when you were there. I put so much pressure on myself...I didn't even understand what I'd done until I saw Bobbi do the same thing around Hunter when she was recovering from what Ward did to her."

"Fitz, I'm just not good for—"

"—Please don't say that. I need you in my life, Simmons, I don't care how. I understand if you don't know what you want. I was impatient before, when I pushed you, when I kissed you that day in the lab. I can see now that you need time. I can do that."

"We had this discussion before? The one you erased?" Simmons whispered.

"We did, but I did everything wrong. I was argumentative and irritable and I gave you no reason to believe a single word I said. I couldn't regret it more."

"Did I say anything else? You told me I'd said things you thought I'd regretted telling you. Things you still remember."

He briefly considered omitting the last thing they hadn't covered, knowing that if he told her what she'd said, she would only feel worse. He could almost justify it, because it seemed cruel to hurt her again, but it just wasn't right. He'd come here to tell her the truth, and he wasn't going to start lying now.

"When I told you I couldn't love Reach, because I…" he paused, feeling his heart start to race at the idea of telling her this again, "...because I love you, you said I could have feelings for both of you. And the reason you knew that was because you'd...felt that way...about me even as you tried to move on with Will, when you thought you'd never be able to come home."

Simmons sat down again, falling heavily down onto the edge of her bed. He felt awful again, sure she wasn't ready to untangle any of this, especially while Will's fate was still undetermined.

"I don't expect anything from you, just because of that," he said, kneeling down in front of her and trying to make eye contact, hoping she could believe him. "You have so much to sort out, I know that. I'll still be here when you do, for whatever you want."

She nodded, closing her eyes and furrowing her brow. "I don't know how I feel about this conversation you wiped out, Fitz. If it went as poorly as you say, I can understand the impulse to undo it. There are so many things I wish I could take back, as well," she said, risking a look at him, her eyes brimming with tears. "It was wrong, though."

"I know," he said, nodding helplessly, trying to show her how completely he understood that what he'd done hadn't been fair.

"But you did it to…" she asked, and it took a moment for him to realize she wanted him to finish the sentence for her.

"To keep you from blaming yourself for everything that's gone wrong with the two of us. I had to stop you from believing you had to leave. I didn't think I could talk you out of it, Simmons, and I panicked."

"I think I can forgive you, Fitz," Simmons said, putting one hand on his shoulder where he was kneeling in front of her. "But I need some time to think things through. Can you understand that?"

"I do," he told her, putting his hand over hers. "If you need me to leave you alone—"

"—I don't," she said, quickly. "We've wasted enough time not being honest with each other and avoiding each other when we weren't sure what to say. I want us to work together. I want you to come back to the lab. I want us to keep talking."

"I'd like that, all three of those things. If you want to talk about anything, Simmons, you just have to ask."

"There _is_ something I'd like to ask you for right now, and then I might need a little time to myself."

"Anything," he promised.

"Before I told you about...everything that happened on the planet...you were calling me 'Jemma'," she said, looking away as though she was about to lose her nerve. "But now, I'm 'Simmons'. Both of those changes seemed...meaningful."

"Which would you like me to use?" he asked, squeezing her hand she'd left on his shoulder as they'd talked.

"I wish that you wanted to call me 'Jemma' again," she whispered, meeting his eyes for a moment before she had to look away again.

"Well then. _Jemma_." He lifted his other hand, brushing her hair back from her face before he cupped her cheek, closing his eyes when he felt her lean into it. "I'll leave you now. But if you need anything…"

"I know who to call," she finished for him.

He pulled away and got to his feet, looking at her for a long moment as she blinked up at him. He couldn't explain how he'd gotten so lucky, that he'd admitted this terrible thing to her that he'd done and it had somehow brought them closer, but he wasn't about to question it. He let himself drink her in for just a beat longer and then he left, closing the door quietly behind him.


	13. Changes

A quiet tension settled over the Playground as their usual sources of intel all seemed to go dry at the same time. Despite careful monitoring of news outlets, law enforcement channels, and their usual governmental sources, Hydra seemed to all but disappear. Lash hadn't been sighted either, despite S.H.I.E.L.D.'s successful contact with two new Inhumans whose powers had just emerged, both of whom decided to stay with S.H.I.E.L.D. after speaking to Daisy. 

Fitz's days settled into a pattern he would have been able to love if not for the terrible sense of foreboding that hung over all of them after Hydra had suddenly gone dark. His days nearly always began with Simmons in the lab, where they worked to refine Reach's headset and create new gear for the rest of Daisy's team of Inhumans. His return to the lab was satisfying on a level he hadn't thought possible, and he and Jemma had found a way to relax around each other enough to resume some of their old work habits. Their afternoons and evenings were often filled with trials of the devices they were designing, though they squeezed in research toward reopening the portal whenever they could. 

One of the best moments of those weeks came when Fitz had been hurrying through the Playground, trying to find Daisy to coordinate a series of tech training sessions for one of her new Inhuman team members. He'd stumbled upon Bobbi giving an impromptu field combat lesson to Reach, Joey, and Ryan, Daisy's newest team member.

* * *

Fitz was drawn to the training room that day by the peals of maniacal laughter that filtered into the corridor, punctuated by Bobbi trying to authoritatively put them back on task while laughing a bit herself. He installed himself in the doorway, crossing his arms and leaning on the doorjamb, as he took in the three Inhumans sparring and joking with each other. He'd never heard Reach laugh like that, not with such careless abandon. It was also the first time he'd seen Ryan, a young man who had the ability to manipulate light, look anything other than utterly miserable since his arrival.

Bobbi repeatedly took Reach aside and whispered to her. Each time she did, either Ryan or Joey soon found himself flat on his back after trying to take Reach down. The only time she lost one of the encounters was after Ryan produced a flash of light from his hands as she came at him, temporarily blinding her enough to catch her off guard.

Fitz called Reach over after that, taking a look at the arm-mounted device she wore that ran the final version of the monitoring program that tracked the data from her headset. He'd been ready to remind her she was supposed to be ultra-conservative about using her powers if she'd been peeking into the future to anticipate the moves her opponents would use against her. When the readout showed only Reach's normal, baseline brain activity with no trace of any use of her powers, Fitz raised his eyebrows in exaggerated surprise, wanting her to see how impressed he was with her progress.

"I thought for sure you were peeking forward," he told her, and she smiled proudly back at him. "Took me months to not be totally useless in combat after Bobbi and the others started working with me," he told Reach. 

"I know, Bobbi told me," she said, giggling when Fitz pretended to be annoyed.

Fitz caught a glimpse over Reach's shoulder of Ryan staring at them, then getting taken down to the mat by Joey. Ryan slammed down hard, the noise echoing off the walls, and the fall was bad enough that Bobbi rushed forward immediately to check on him.

"I'm okay," Ryan said, massaging the shoulder that had impacted the ground. "I got distracted."

"Distractions can come from anywhere in the field," Bobbi told them. "You have to split your attention, try not to let yourself get taken by surprise. The things that pull your focus might tell you important information or they might be completely irrelevant. Evaluate everything as quickly as possible, but don't ever get so lost in thought that you drop your defenses."

Ryan looked over at Reach again before he got up, allowing Bobbi to check him out before he and Joey went back to sparring. Fitz had seen the look on Ryan's face and it was immediately familiar to him, a version of what he imagined he looked like most of the time he was around Jemma.

"What do you think of this Ryan character?" Fitz asked her, narrowing his eyes at the man from across the room.

"He's cute. Nice. Really having trouble adjusting to this whole superpower thing," she said, blushing a little as her eyes darted between Ryan and Fitz as she talked.

"You _like_ him," Fitz whispered, scandalized, then whined indignantly when she smacked him on the shoulder.

"I do not," she insisted, looking down at the floor.

Fitz began to make plans in the back of his mind to ask Ryan a few questions—just a few completely casual questions—during his next assistive device adjustment. If he was going to be looking at Reach like _that_ , Fitz wanted to know if he deserved the looks Reach was already giving him in return.

"Maybe I should talk to him now," Fitz muttered, under his breath, getting him another smack on the shoulder.

"I can take care of myself, Fitz," Reach told him, but she looked a tiny bit pleased behind the look of annoyance she was putting on.

"Yeah, I know," he said, still privately debating how odd it would seem if he asked Ryan to stop by the lab when they were done with Bobbi. "I don't want you to get hurt. Would it be so bad if I made sure he was a decent person?"

"Well, my last boyfriend tried to murder me when he found out I had powers, so I can't see how Ryan isn't a massive step up," she began. "Listen, I never had a sibling either, but I keep having to talk myself out of going to Simmons and asking her what her intentions are with you. If would make you feel better to talk to Ryan—carefully, without making him feel interrogated—I think I can understand that."

"I'll try not to scare him too badly," he said, laughing when Reach bugged her eyes out with comic exasperation. He decided to change the subject, shelving his protective brotherly instincts for the moment. "How did your other training go this morning, with May and Daisy?" he asked, 

"I had one yellow flash on my monitor, when Agent May had me balancing on one foot with my eyes closed while I jumped five minutes into the past, and then she snuck up on me and tried to push me over. Lost my concentration for a second while I bobbled."

"Mind if I take a look?" Fitz asked, and she reluctantly pulled her monitor out of its holster on her arm and handed it to him.

"It wasn't bad, really, Scotty," she said, and his ears perked up on her use of the nickname. He'd found her language idiosyncrasies tended to emerge when she was nervous about something, or worse, felt like she had to hide something.

He toggled backward into the memory storage of the monitor, his lips pursing when he saw the height of the spike from earlier that morning. She was correct about it being short in duration, but the severity of the change in her EEG and her pain indicator readings were much worse than she'd made it sound.

"Yellow?" he asked, tilting his head as he studied her, handing back the monitor. She avoided his eyes as she slid it into place.

"Red," she admitted. "I wasn't expecting you to double-check me."

"Reach, we see the data after it downloads to the lab overnight," he reminded her. "I can't help you if you're not honest with me. I don't think one quick spike, even a red one, over a two hour training session is a deal-breaker, but trying to withhold information from me is."

"You're right. Sorry, Fitz. I'll talk to Simmons about it later tonight...if she's around," Reach said, looking at him with huge, innocence-exuding eyes. "Unless she's going to be busy."

Fitz blinked at her while he considered his answer, telling himself it was good that she was fishing for information about how he and Jemma were doing in their personal relationship. It meant she couldn't possibly be sneaking in usage of her powers and she'd listened to Jemma when she'd directed Reach to use her powers during focused training only.

"Make sure you find her before seven. It's movie night," he said, trying to sound casual.

Reach appeared to be in anguish as she struggled to hold back her reaction, her teeth grinding together as a tiny squeak of excitement escaped from her before she could stop it. She took in a deep, fast breath through her nose and seemed to calm herself down, closing her eyes as she exhaled. "Yeah, I should be able to get to the lab before seven."

"See that you do, she'll want to take a look at these readings before your next session with May," he said, silently declining to comment on her brief outburst of glee a moment before.

* * *

Later that evening, Fitz moved nervously around his quarters, debating every detail to extremes he could readily admit were bordering on the ridiculous. He'd rearranged his bed like a couch, pillows lining the wall behind where they'd sit and a blanket for them to use to ward off the cool, but he was looking at it now and wondering if she'd take it the wrong way. Perhaps he should have brought in chairs? He wondered if he had time to get some, then took a double-take at the clock when he checked it. She would be there any second, and the realization made him stop and take a deep breath. They had watched hundreds of movies together, many of them while alone in one of their bedrooms in various dormitories, apartments, and S.H.I.E.L.D. facilities, but he'd never felt this anxious and conflicted about an ostensibly innocent evening with her before.

Since the evening he'd admitted the truth to her about the reset Reach had given him, he had tried not to think too much about where he and Jemma stood with each other. He knew he was still earning back a bit of trust, and it was plain that she she still needed time and space to think about what had happened to her on Maveth. 

They'd slowly begun to spend time together outside the lab again, beginning with movie nights with some of their friends in the common room, then sometimes engaging in heated battles over the few battered board games the Playground stocked. It wasn't until Hunter took Fitz aside one night and asked if he and Jemma had "finally worked out what the rest of them had known all along" that Fitz had taken the chance of inviting her to watch a movie with just the two of them, in privacy of his quarters.

He checked the popcorn bowl for at least the sixth time, taste-testing a single piece to reassure himself that it was the way she liked it. He'd already queued up the movie, pausing it perfectly on the last frame of black screen before the production company logos would appear. Jemma liked to watch every second, having complained to him on most of their previous movie nights when he'd impatiently fast forwarded past the credits and other irrelevancies before the opening scene.

He was about to check the drinks he'd hidden away in the cooler he'd stuffed into his closet, but he was interrupted by a knock at his door. He took one step toward the closet anyway when a burst of low-grade panic forced his brain to short circuit, but he soon managed to redirect himself and headed for the door.

"Hello, Fitz," she said, her eyes shifting upward to meet his as he opened the door. 

He swallowed hard, wondering how her voice could sound so different to him right now than it had in the lab, earlier. They'd had a casual conversation about tomorrow's schedule before he left her an hour before, and he'd had no trouble then thinking of something to say or finding his voice to say it.

"Jemma," he managed, staring at her until she began to look a little uncertain.

"Could I...should I come in?" she asked, hesitantly. 

He was running her words around in his head, watching distractedly as her fingers tightened around the book and small box she was carrying, when it occurred to him what she was asking.

"Oh! Yeah, of course you should. Sorry," he said, opening the door wider and moving out of the way to let her by. She stepped in slowly, looking around as though she hadn't seen the inside of his quarters a thousand times before. 

"How have you been?" she asked, her brow furrowing as she winced. "Well, we just saw each other an hour ago. I expect you've been fine in the interim."

The awkwardness of Jemma's question actually made Fitz feel a lot better. It seemed he wasn't the only one feeling unbalanced, but he didn't know if she was anxious because she wanted something to happen between them or because she wasn't feeling ready for that. If he could just read her, look for any clues she might be leaving him, he could decide on some way to approach the rest of the evening.

Yes, he told himself, that's all he had to figure out. He only had to answer the oldest, most difficult and uncomfortable question in the history of human social interaction. 

"Something to drink?" he offered, and she nodded right away.

"Whatever you have," she said.

He waited until he turned around to grimace with what felt like actual pain as he realized he was about to offer her an overwhelming array of choices. He decided to simplify things, as she didn't look like she wanted to be faced with a decision between the half-dozen alternatives he had ready.

"Water? It's nice and cold," he offered, plunging his hand into the ice he'd packed into the cooler.

"Yes, actually, that sounds lovely," she said, and as he searched for a water bottle, he caught a glimpse of her sitting on the edge of his bed, turning to look behind herself, and then standing back up abruptly.

"Is there something wrong?" he asked, holding the water out to her, then waiting for her to set the box and book she was carrying down on his desk before she was able to take it. He was rethinking setting up his bed for them to sit on and wishing again that he'd borrowed the chairs from the common room instead.

"No!" she answered quickly, before twisting the cap off the water bottle and taking a long gulp. "I wasn't sure where you might want me to put those," she added, gesturing to the box she'd dropped on his desk.

"What are—" he began, stopping himself when he recognized the pattern on the packaging. "Tea cakes," he breathed, reaching out for the box and feeling a wave of nostalgia wash over him. "I haven't seen these in...I don't know how long."

"Daisy and Lincoln had that stayover, when they left to follow that lead on another Inhuman that turned out to be bad intel? There was a British import shop near their hotel. She sent me a message offering to pick up something I might be missing from home, and I remembered how much you like these," she explained.

"Thanks," he told her, strangely overcome that she'd thought of him. 

"Of course, I should have brought tea to go with them, but I couldn't carry it all," she said, holding up her hands and then dropping them awkwardly as her sentence trailed off.

"I can go to the mess and make us some tea later," he said, not excited about leaving her at the moment, not even for tea with real Scottish tea cakes. "We can save them for after the movie, if that would be all right?"

She nodded, and he noticed the blush coloring her cheeks when she took another long drink of her water.

"Bradbury?" he asked, looking at the book she'd brought as he put the tea cakes back on his desk.

"I'm sorry?" she asked, blinking at him in confusion. "Oh, the book."

Fitz picked it up, turning the book over in his hands. " _The Golden Apples of the Sun_ ," he said, running his fingers over the raised lettering on the cover. "Isn't this the anthology that—"

"—It has _A Sound of Thunder_ in it, yes," she finished for him. "I came straight here from talking to Reach, and she'd borrowed this from me. She's quite concerned about the ethical implications of her power and she's been doing a lot of research, but I'm sure she's discussed that with you, as well."

"A little," he admitted, feeling anxious again as they danced a little too close to the subject of his unfair use of Reach's powers a few weeks before. "She's come up with a fairly stringent set of rules for herself."

"She's really quite lovely," Jemma said, a bit of an impish look in her eyes. "Ryan seems to think so, as well."

"As long as he doesn't hurt her, he's got nothing to worry about," Fitz answered, raising his eyebrow at Jemma as she laughed at him.

"She can more than handle herself, Fitz."

"I'm aware," he said, setting the book down again, feeling the awkwardness beginning to descend again as their conversation began to wind down.

"Do you think we'll be comfortable—" he began.

"Should we start the—" she said, both of them speaking over the other.

They both stopped and she waved her hand at him, indicating he should go first.

"I just wanted to ask if you think we'll be comfortable...there…" he said, pointing at his bed. "I could borrow some furniture from the common room if you don't think—"

"It looks wonderful, Fitz. We've both been on our feet all day, every day, it seems, for weeks." She ran her hand over one of the pillows he'd lined up against the wall and something about the way she did it made him stop breathing for a moment, swallowing hard. "It looks perfect, honestly." She toed off her shoes and climbed onto the bed, curling up and leaning toward the side he would be sitting on.

"Lights on?" he asked, turning around quickly to stop himself from simply standing there, gobsmacked, staring at her as she laid back into the pillows with her hair splaying out wildly around her head.

"Oh, switched off, if it's all right with you. We've spent so much time under that harsh lighting in the lab, and I think my eyes could use the rest."

"Of course," he answered, trying to keep any indication of the abject terror he was feeling out of his voice. He reminded himself of the other hundred times he'd sat next to her in a darkened room for one reason or another and managed to keep control of himself. 

"Is that popcorn?" she asked, pointing to the bowl on his desk.

He turned to answer her just as she was stretching her arms upward, arching her back and rolling her head from side to side to relax her neck, and every word he'd ever learned died simultaneously on his tongue. He nodded dumbly instead, trying to grab the bowl without taking his eyes off her and almost knocking it to the floor in the process.

"Fitz, are you all right?" she asked, sitting up a little with a look of actual concern on her face.

"Yeah, sorry. I guess my eyes haven't adjusted quite yet," he said, trying to cover for his ridiculousness. He handed her the bowl and started the movie, moving the blanket to crawl up on the bed next to her.

"I've really been looking forward to this, Fitz," she said, leaning toward him to whisper into his ear. She'd put her hand on his shoulder to steady herself and it slipped down his back when she was done talking, rubbing between his shoulders for a moment before she let it drop to the mattress behind him.

He turned toward her to respond and found that she hadn't pulled back, which put their faces so close that he could feel the soft puff of air from her surprised gasp on his face. They stared at each other, motionless, for what seemed like forever. Then her eyes dropped down to his mouth. 

There were a thousand things he should say. Their relationship had become so complicated that they couldn't afford any ambiguities or uncertainty about any decision they made together, but he couldn't translate that need to talk to her into any actual ability to put a sentence together. When her tongue came out and ran slowly over her bottom lip, he could do nothing but blink dumbly at her and feel the wild pounding of his heart against his chest.

He distantly registered the sound of the movie continuing in the background as he lifted his hand and threaded it through her hair, coming to rest only when he was cradling her head gently in his palm. Her eyes fluttered a bit and she steadied herself by returning her hand to his shoulder. 

"Jemma?" he asked, making her name into a question and hoping beyond hope she would understand what he meant.

"Fitz," she said, exhaling on his name and drawing it out into a moan, her fingers curling into his shoulder as she pulled him closer.

* * *

Hours later, Fitz pulled unwillingly away from her to pad across the room, trying very hard not to step on any of their clothes that were strewn haphazardly all around the bed. He shut off the alarm he'd set for the next morning, then switched off the monitor where the movie they'd ignored all night had played. He felt his way back to her in the dark, sliding under the blanket next to her and sighing when she molded herself to him. He pulled her closer, brushing his thumb over her bare shoulder as sleep overtook him again.


	14. The Final Trial

A few days later, Fitz caught himself staring at Jemma as she was finishing her morning routine. He was still gobsmacked by the mere idea of it. Jemma was _in his room_ , doing something as domestic as blow-drying her hair, and it wasn't because they'd fallen asleep during a platonic movie night or studied so late they'd fallen asleep over their books. They were spending so much time together, both of them moving many things into each other's quarters, that Fitz had begun to consider ways to broach the subject of the two of them requesting one shared, larger room.

Jemma caught his eye in the mirror and she tilted her head in mild confusion for a moment. Then her expression was overcome by a very pretty, slightly embarrassed smile.

"Are you watching me for hair care tips?" she asked, after switching off the blow dryer.

"You know I can't do a thing with it," he said, holding his hands up around his head and miming what she'd just been doing. A wave of genuine joy came over him when she laughed, a carefree, untroubled expression of her happiness.

"Do we have time for breakfast?" she asked, still giggling a bit at him.

"I slipped out while you were in the shower and made the tea, grabbed us a couple of muffins. I think that's all we can manage without being late."

"That sounds lovely, Fitz. Thank you."

They stood over the side table and began to eat, which wasn't the most comfortable arrangement, but they made do. Their hands brushed occasionally as they moved from cup to plate and back, a simple but very distracting pleasure. Fitz finished his muffin and then stared down at the crumbs, realizing he'd been in such a pleasant haze that he had no idea what flavor it had been.

Once Jemma had finished, they set out for the training room. They planned to test what Fitz hoped were the final changes to the design of Reach's headset, now that he'd embedded the sensors in the lightest frame he could make without risking the integrity of the readings. They were up early, hoping to complete the test during Reach's regular sunrise appointment with May, and Fitz had to stifle more than one yawn behind his hand before they got there.

They entered quietly, Fitz watching as Reach and May executed a series of tai chi forms side-by-side, their eyes closed. Reach didn't have May's effortless grace, but she had clearly been practicing and absorbing everything she could from her instructor.

"Don't open your eyes," May said, quietly. She stayed motionless in an elegant crouch, her arms held protectively in front of her. "How many people just entered the room?"

Reach waited a moment before answering, bobbling just a little as she tried to hold the pose. "Two," she said, decisively.

"Yes," May began, "but did you say that because you were expecting them to come, or did you judge it solely based on the cues?"

"Both," Reach admitted, and May relaxed her stance, nodding thoughtfully.

"That's actually the right answer," May said, motioning for Reach to take a break as well. "Don't ever ignore information if it's credible, but keep checking for anything new that will either back up what you know, or cause you reevaluate it."

Reach grinned, then grabbed her water bottle and walked over to Fitz and Jemma, taking a long drink as she moved toward them.

"Do you have it?" Reach asked Fitz, and she gasped, her hand to her mouth, when Fitz produced the headset. He'd put in quite a lot of finishing work, replacing the practical, bare-bones straps with smoother, swooping curves, fitted more carefully to the shape of her head. He'd chosen the color to blend in with her hair, but he'd given it a subtle metallic sheen and embedded a pattern of raised swirls in the surface that seemed to shimmer when they caught the light. She slipped it over her head and grinned at her. It looked exactly as he'd pictured it.

"Seems the fit is right," Fitz said, circling her to make sure it was flush with her skin with no gaps. It seemed perfect, just tight enough to stay in place.

"It's amazing," Reach gushed. "It must have taken forever, Fitz."

"I'd say it isn't every day I get to design gear for a superhero, but between you and the rest of Daisy's team, it probably will be," Fitz joked.

"Are we taking it out for a spin?" she asked, looking hopeful. "I've been taking it easy, barely using my powers at all unless Agent May or Daisy asked me to as part of an exercise."

"Daisy has a training session planned for a few of you this afternoon," Fitz explained, motioning to Reach to hand him the monitor she wore strapped to her forearm so he could pair it with the new headset. "We need to make sure this is functioning properly before that."

"It would be best for you to save your effort for this afternoon," Jemma added, pressing lightly on a few of the contact points of the headset to double-check the fit. "We'll just do enough to make sure the readings are accurate."

"We can wrap our session there," May called out, gracefully arranging a towel around her neck. "Don't tire yourself out," she cautioned, with just a hint of a smile curling at the corners of her lips. "I'm leading the team you'll be training against this afternoon."

To her credit, Reach kept her head up and spine straight as she nodded, looking confident until May left the room. When she was gone, Reach slumped a little, giving Fitz and Jemma a helpless look.

"Ugh, we're doomed," Reach moaned. "Agent May will have us for lunch."

A genuine smile broke out on Fitz's face and Jemma giggled next to him. Reach's mouth fell open in a distressed sort of hurt and and Fitz was about to explain that they weren't laughing at her, exactly, but Jemma reached out and rubbed Reach's shoulders consolingly instead. Reach relaxed a little, though she still looked a bit worried. 

"It's an exercise," Fitz began. "You're more likely to learn from mistakes than anything else. The four of you have only been working together for a few weeks. Just do your best."

Reach nodded, then leaned toward them conspiratorially. "Ryan and I have a few moves we've been working on that none of them have seen. I think we might surprise them a little."

"Let's get you cleared on this new equipment, then," Jemma said, getting them straight to business. "I'd like you to start with something simple, and I'll keep an eye on your monitor to start with."

Fitz handed Jemma the monitor he'd finished pairing with the headset and Reach shook the tension out of her shoulders and neck before she stilled, closing her eyes for a few seconds.

"All readings are within normal range, Fitz," Reach said, her voice oddly tinged with a rough approximation of Jemma's round English vowels. "You were about to say that, right?" Reach asked, looking at Jemma.

Fitz was trying desperately not to smile as Jemma blinked at Reach in surprise, as though she was still trying to process her opinion of the impersonation.

"Yes," Jemma said, haltingly. "I was indeed on the verge of saying that."

Reach looked a little worried at Jemma's reaction, so Fitz cleared his throat to change the subject. 

"Something more complicated now?" he suggested, moving behind Jemma to glance at the readings over her shoulder, though it was mostly an excuse to brush his hand along the small of her back. When that made her turn her head away and blush, he thought about leaning forward to quietly tease her about her not being able to resist him, but those plans died once his eyes fell on the curve of her neck as it elongated and was fully exposed just under his mouth. Suddenly, he couldn't think of anything except closing his lips over her collarbone and working upwards until he found that place behind her ear that always made her gasp.

"Fitz! What the hell? Are you guys listening to me?" Reach said, waving her arms. When Fitz tore his eyes away from Jemma, Reach put her hands on her hips, her face frozen in a sort of exasperated glare.

"Sorry," Fitz began, walking away from Jemma to clear his head.

"I've asked you three times what we should do next," Reach continued, though the glare was gone now, replaced by a smirk. "Come on, test me. I'm feeling really focused today."

Fitz rolled up his sleeve, about to offer Reach his arm, when he realized that he hadn't offered his mind up to Reach since he and Jemma became...whatever they were now. He hesitated, rubbing his elbow self-consciously as he tried to figure out what he should do.

Reach beckoned him closer. "Fitz, you remember the first time you let me do this? I told you that if I got too close to something you wanted to stay private, you could push me out? It still works that way, you know."

"Yeah, I know," he said, still feeling hesitant. "It's not that I don't trust you," he added, hoping she'd understand what he meant.

"How about I look forward instead of back?" she offered. "There's always less detail that way. You won't be able to see what I'm doing, so it's less awkward for you. I promise to keep my nose out of anything you want to keep to yourself. I think I can guess what that might be," she said, looking pointedly at Jemma before turning her attention back to Fitz.

"That might be better, at least for now," he agreed.

"Thanks, Fitz. I know it kind of sucks having me rooting around in your head whenever I need to practice. Ryan keeps offering, but…" she said, then she looked helplessly at Fitz, unable to put the rest of her thoughts into words.

"That's not how you want to learn about him, is it?" Fitz asked.

"No! Well, yeah, that's exactly it." She looked away, thoughtfully. "Shit. I'm screwed, aren't I? I really like him."

Fitz laughed. "I know just what you mean," he assured her, turning to Jemma to signal that they were ready to go as he held his arm out for Reach. 

He braced himself when Reach's hand closed around his wrist, but there was no rush of nausea this time. Reach's eyes closed and she breathed deeply, her head tilting a few times before her forehead suddenly wrinkled and she winced. Fitz looked at Jemma, wondering if Reach's concentration had wavered, if her readings were going into the yellow or red, but Jemma didn't seem concerned as she looked at the monitor in her hands.

Reach let go, blinking a few times at Fitz until she seemed to force a smile onto her face. "I'm not feeling any after-effects," she reported. "No headache, no pain. I think that was good."

"It's all green," Jemma confirmed. "Test successful," she said, smiling warmly at Reach. "The headset appears to be working properly, and I can clear you for the training session this afternoon. I'm sure you'll do quite well."

Reach looked skeptical, and Fitz was about to jump in and reassure her when she began to speak.

"I'm really used to Fitz, though," she began, looking guiltily at Jemma. "I'm afraid it's working so smoothly because of that, and not because of the focus exercises and all that stuff."

"Hey, you've been working really hard," Fitz told her. "Give yourself the credit, not me. All I did was stand here."

"It's asking a lot, Agent Simmons, but could I get one more trial...with you?" Reach asked, all but pleading with Jemma to agree.

Fitz could see how much Jemma wanted to say no. She'd always been such a private person and he couldn't imagine she'd be comfortable with this. Jemma stared at the floor for a moment, then at Fitz, before striding across the room, clicking the monitor into the holster attached to reach's bicep.

"Certainly," she said, pushing the arm of her sweater up, over her elbow, and holding her arm out to Reach.

Fitz couldn't believe it, staring silently at Jemma as her arm shook a little. He tried to think of something to say to stop this, still not sure why Reach would ask for it in the first place.

"Fitz, could you wait in the hallway?" Reach asked. "I'm so familiar with you and I'm afraid if you're here, I'll pick up things from you instead." When Fitz gaped at her, unable to answer at first, she mumbled a quiet apology, shrugging her shoulders helplessly.

"Yeah," he finally forced himself to say. "Jemma, if that's all right?" 

When Jemma nodded, he wished she hadn't turned away from him to face Reach. He really wanted to see her face before he left, to make sure she was really okay with this. Instead, all he could do was leave, leaning against the wall opposite the door after he closed it behind him.

It was only a few minutes before Jemma appeared, looking troubled and biting her lip. Fitz felt awful, and he chastised himself for not putting a stop to this while he still could.

"Jemma, are you…" he said, trailing off when she looked at him, her eyes wide and her breathing fast. "What is Reach playing at?" he said, more to himself than to Jemma, and he started toward the door, his hand on the doorknob when Jemma stopped him, barring his way with her arm across his chest.

"It's all right," she said, still breathing hard. "She didn't want to do it. She was really worried and didn't know what else to do. It isn't her fault."

"What are you talking about?" he asked, feeling his own panic rising to match Jemma's.

"She didn't want to tell me, not after we were the ones who convinced her she shouldn't share any of her knowledge of the future with anyone else. I understand why she had to do it, though. Don't be angry with her," she said, the words falling from her in a rush.

"Jemma," he began, taking her by the shoulders and facing them towards each other. "You have to tell me what happened. You're really scaring me."

She took a deep breath and swallowed, looking at Fitz and appearing to think over what he'd asked. "I don't know if it's better to tell you or not," she admitted. She squeezed her eyes shut, then appeared to make up her mind. Her fingers curled painfully into his waist as she started to speak again. "In your past, she saw when I was on the other planet. She said I was just blacked out, like I didn't exist. It was like I'd disappeared."

Fitz shrugged, remembering when Reach had asked him about this weeks ago, the first time she'd looked into his past. "It makes sense, I think. Her power must not be able to reach halfway across the universe." Dread washed over him as it began to sink in, the only possible reason Jemma would be talking about this. "Please tell me she didn't see that in your future. I'm not letting that happen," he told her, not caring at all about whatever Reach had seen. As long as there was still breath in his body, Jemma was never going to go through that again.

"Not me," Jemma choked out, starting to cry. "You."


	15. Training Exercise

"Jemma," he whispered, pulling her into his chest and winding his arms around her back. "It's all right. I'm here, I'm not going anywhere."

She sniffled, followed by a few quick, panicked-sounding intakes of breath. He rubbed her back, wishing Reach hadn't said anything. He believed in her powers, if for no other reason than because he'd seen them for himself and she'd done things he couldn't explain any other way. But this—that she'd seen him gone the same way Jemma had been gone—it was more than he could comprehend.

"I know she can see the future, Jemma, but I've also seen it change. I'm here right now, and you know I'd never leave you unless I had to."

"You can't go there," Jemma whispered, but he was heartened to hear her sounding more composed. "It's terrible. And I'm terrible," she added, "because if you have to go there for us to rescue Will, I want us to stop researching. I won't risk you."

"We don't know what the circumstances are supposed to be, right? Reach couldn't see that?" he asked, and Jemma shook her head against his chest, burrowing closer to him when she was done. "Then we can't do anything about it now," he told her, nuzzling the top of her head with his cheek. "I can't live like that, the two of us dreading this thing that hasn't happened yet."

"Promise me you won't go through that portal," she said, her voice soft and shaky. It was the sound of desperation, and it broke his heart.

He wanted to simply agree, if only to give her some comfort, but he couldn't do that. She was asking him to do the one thing he knew he couldn't do—lie to her. He took her by the shoulders and gently pulled her back, ducking his head until she looked at him.

"There is one reason—exactly one reason—I would go through that portal. It's the same reason I went through it the first time, and that was for you. If your safety depended on me doing it again, you know I would, Jemma. You can't ask me not to."

"Fitz," she said, reaching up to cup his jaw in her palm, running her finger over the stubble. "How did we get here?"

"We fought for it, because we wanted this more than anything else. We've handled everything that's come before. We aren't going to stop now. I don't care what she saw. If I do have to go through that portal, you have to know I'll be coming back. To you. No matter what."

"Fitz," she said, her voice breaking as she fisted her hands into his shirt. "I can't...I can't just walk into the lab and go about the day as though...I'm not absolutely terrified." She swallowed hard, shutting her eyes, then gasped as she fought against the return of her tears.

"We don't have to do anything," he told her, tracing his thumb along the curves of her face, lost in the detail as he tried to memorize her. "We can disappear. Disappear for good, if you'd like. We'll be those people they'll all talk about, years from now. 'Whatever happened to Jemma and Fitz?' they'll ask."

He knew what he was saying was ridiculous, but it felt true. Everything felt true, as long as he looked into her eyes when he said it.

"Fitz," she said, and it was all there, in his name. He knew exactly what she meant, that she loved him for being nonsensical when she needed it, for telling her that even the patently impossible things were well within their reach. He knew that only because she made it all seem possible for him, as well.

"We'll take the morning off," he said, and he felt her relax against him. "We'll go to the training this afternoon, but before that, it's just for us."

"But Fitz, what about—"

"We'll worry about everything else when it comes," he told her. "We can do anything." It wasn't hope, not even a promise, or at least, it didn't feel that way. He simply believed it was true, and he couldn't be afraid of anything Reach could see as long as he and Jemma could meet whatever was waiting for them, together.

He laid his hands over hers, coaxing her to release his shirt, then clasped their palms together so he could lead her through the corridors. He thought about taking them to her room, wondering if she might be more comfortable there. His was closer, though, and that was as far as he was willing to go before they could be alone. What they needed now was to shut everything else out for awhile and remember why everything they'd been through had been worth it.

* * *

Fitz held Jemma in the darkness of his quarters, blinking himself awake a few minutes before the alarm he'd set was about to go off. Neither of them wanted to miss the training exercise, but waking from their nap with her so warm and real in his arms tempted him to shut the alarm off, wake her, and then pull her into another long kiss.

He brushed his hand down her arm and she moaned a little and shifted toward him, not waking up, yet still aware of him. It all still felt like a dream, having her here with him this way, and he couldn't quite stop his mind from wandering to how easily they could lose it all. If what Reach saw was true, there were two things he knew for sure. Jemma's life would be in danger again, and he would have to leave her in an attempt to keep her safe. He could think of no other reason he would go through the portal, no other explanation that made sense.

He pulled her even closer, the room suddenly feeling cold to him and the blanket wasn't enough to ward it off. Her eyelashes fluttered and she turned toward him a little, smiling up at him even before she was awake enough to open her eyes.

"Mmm. We should play hooky from the lab every morning," she said, her voice low as she reached up to run her fingers through his hair. 

"Where's my ICER? I have to subdue an undercover Hydra agent masquerading as Jemma Simmons, because the Jemma I know would never suggest we skive off work every day," he said, closing his eyes as her fingers worked magic against his scalp. 

She laughed and began to pull him toward her for a kiss, but his alarm began its annoying beep just as their lips were about to touch. Fitz groaned and leaned back to shut it off, while Jemma rolled toward him, ending up draped over his chest once he was done cutting off the noise.

"How much leeway did you give us, when you set that?" she asked, trailing a finger from his waist to his collarbone and temporarily ending his ability to speak.

He groaned, wishing he'd foreseen this eventuality when he'd blearily set the alarm a few hours before. "Not enough," he told her, and she dropped her face into the middle of his chest in disappointment.

"I know we need to go, but..." she trailed off. "Perhaps if we saved time and showered together?"

"That wouldn't save us time," he said, trying to sit up without jostling her too much. "If I got you in there, we wouldn't come out until we ran the entire base out of hot water."

"Fitz! That's not helping," she said, pouting at him and making him wonder exactly how important it was that they attend the training that afternoon. He made himself stop that line of thinking when she pulled his shirt around her shoulders and buttoned a few buttons, then levered herself over him to hop down from the bed. "I'll be quick," she promised, disappearing into the bathroom.

He let his head fall back to the pillow, allowing himself one more groan of frustration before he pushed himself to his feet.

* * *

Fitz and Jemma made it to the training room while the two groups were still preparing, and they slipped into a dark corner of the room. Fitz had brought a tablet with him, loaded with a program that would allow them to watch the performance of the various devices they'd designed for Daisy's team. When he glanced down at the readout, Reach's vitals were slightly elevated. He pointed it out to Jemma, silently asking for her opinion of what he was seeing.

"It's nothing dangerous," she assured him. "Normal, under the circumstances." When he gave her a curious look, she continued. "Look at the team she's about to face off against, and tell me what you think your heart rate would look like if you were her."

He looked to the far side of the room, past the obstacles that had been set up as a training course, and saw the team May had put together. May, Bobbi, Hunter, and Mack were arranged in a circle wearing their full tac gear. The four of them were engrossed in discussion, with May pointing to different parts of the course occasionally as she laid out her strategy.

Next to the all-star team of Ops agents, Daisy's team looked hopelessly young. They clearly weren't about to concede, however, the four of them huddled closely together as they, too appeared to be finalizing their strategy.

Daisy left Coulson and Lincoln, who were watching from the catwalk overhead, and descended the stairs to stand with Fitz and Jemma. Daisy looked as nervous as Fitz had ever seen her, clearly believing that the fate of her team hung in the balance of their performance in the exercise today.

"They'll do their best," Fitz told her, but Daisy continued to stare at her team. "You've seen how hard they've been working with you, May, and Bobbi. No one could expect them to have made more progress than they have."

"Tell that to Coulson," Daisy whispered. "I left Lincoln up there with him to try to get a read on him, but I can't tell what he's thinking. Coulson's like a robot, he's giving me nothing."

"They're quite good," Jemma reassured her. "And they have Fitz's devices on their side, so they're sure to do well," she added, grinning at Fitz and reaching out to squeeze his hand.

"Do you know how they're planning to use Jake's power?" Fitz asked, watching as Joey pulled Jake aside. "The exercise will be in the dark. Doesn't Jake need eye contact to use his power with someone else?"

Fitz thought through Jake's abilities as Daisy shrugged at him, looking more nervous now that he'd pointed out how much the scenario was stacked against one member of her team. Jake's power gave him an amazing grasp of languages—the capacity to quickly learn any language he studied, paired with the ability to create a gibberish language that could be understood by anyone he held eye contact with while speaking it. Fitz could imagine a thousand uses for coded communication in the field, but the darkness would certainly make the application of his gift challenging.

May separated from her team and walked to the center of the room, standing silently until the team of Inhumans broke from their discussion to turn and face her.

"Points will be scored for various objectives over the course of the exercise," May began, barely raising her voice but managing to hold the attention of everyone in the room regardless. "There's nothing out of bounds, but I'll be very annoyed if anyone sustains more than a minor injury. If you are captured or incapacitated by a member of the enemy team, you will be considered out of the exercise and the opposite team will score a point. Everyone is armed with a dummy ICER, loaded with blank rounds. If you're hit, you're out of the exercise and the enemy team will score a point. There is an escape point at the top of the climbing wall at the rear of the room. If the rest of your team is taken down, you can score a point for making it to the escape point without being caught."

May nodded to Coulson, who dimmed the lights in the room using the tablet in his hands. Both teams retreated behind the tallest obstacles near their 'base' area, the Inhumans trading last-minute strategies while the Ops team waited silently, back to back, for the exercise to begin.

On Coulson's go, he immediately dimmed the lights a bit more, and Fitz's eyes strained to adjust to make out the movement on the training floor. From their vantage point, he could see both teams as they moved out. The Inhumans moved forward as a group while the Ops team separated completely, spreading out along the width of the room.

"Ops is setting up a flank," Daisy whispered, her restless fingers tightening into anxious fists in front of her. "If my team doesn't respond, all four of them could get taken out at once."

"Where's Hunter?" Fitz whispered, trying to catch a glimpse of him in the dark, but he seemed to have entirely disappeared.

"There are four trap doors in play," Daisy said, craning her neck to try to get a better look herself. "He must have gone down. He's probably trying to get behind them."

May was covering the front of the formation, her ICER held ready as she crouched behind a low wall in the forward center of the room. She peeked out occasionally, looking for an opportunity to hit one of the Inhumans with a dummy round or provide cover for another member of her team. Bobbi and Mack were on opposite sides of the room, each of them moving forward, one wall at a time.

Reach turned around, looking at the floor behind them, and then grabbed Joey. She whispered something to him and he made his way to the back corner of the room, pointing his hands at the floor. Fitz could hear the trap door rattling, but Joey had melted the door shut and Hunter couldn't make it through. Joey took cover, but he was now separated from the rest of the group.

Reach, Ryan, and Jake broke off and moved forward, closing on Bobbi's location. Reach seemed to react a moment before Hunter began to pull himself up through another trap door a few yards behind Bobbi. She poked Ryan to quietly get his attention, then pointed toward Hunter's location. 

Ryan and Reach both leaned out from the far side of their obstacle, Ryan close to the floor and Reach above him. She fired a cover shot from her ICER while Ryan shot a burst of light toward the floor, blinding Hunter and forcing him back into the floor.

Bobbi reacted as Ryan and Reach gave away their position, making a break for the wall the Inhumans were hidden behind and scaling it easily, flipping over the top and landing on her feet behind them.

It was a daring move, one that would either allow Bobbi to remove three of the Inhumans in one action, or allow them to take her out instead. Fitz heard Daisy gasp when Bobbi's leg sweep knocked Jake to the floor and she was leveling her ICER at Reach and Ryan, but Ryan was ready for her. He waited until almost the last second and then blinded Bobbi with another blast of light, her shot going over their heads as they ducked. Jake got to his feet and pulled his own ICER, holding it at Bobbi's back.

Bobbi put up her hands and said, "Incapacitated," removing herself from the exercise. Daisy sighed with relief next to Fitz and Bobbi left the floor, joining Daisy, Fitz, and Jemma at the side of the room.

"I knew she'd see that coming," Bobbi said, "but I wanted to see how they'd react to a direct assault. I honestly thought they'd hesitate too long and I'd be able to take at least one of them with me. I'm really impressed, Daisy."

Daisy beamed, but she still looked nervous. "Three left, but with you out, Bobbi, I like our chances a lot more."

"We shouldn't have sent Hunter down," Bobbi observed. "Reach knows where he is before any of the rest of us do. Without comms, we can't track him. We gave them more information about our team than we had ourselves."

"Even I didn't know how specifically Reach can predict what's about to happen, and I've been training with her for weeks. I thought her view of the future was fuzzier than this," Daisy added.

"Apparently not," Fitz said, gesturing toward Reach's group of three as they moved together behind new cover. When they were there safely, Reach turned directly toward Mack's current position. Fitz hadn't seen Mack moving at all, but once Reach pointed him out to her teammates, Fitz could see Mack had managed to sneak forward. He was now standing flattened against the opposite side of the obstacle Joey was hiding behind.

"There's another trap door behind Joey, to the left. He may not know it's there," Bobbi whispered. "Mack and Hunter might have him surrounded."

As Bobbi finished speaking, Reach clapped her hands twice and Joey immediately turned to face her. Reach leapt for the cover of another obstacle, pulling May and Mack's focus toward her.

Fitz gave Bobbi a questioning look, and Bobbi pulled him closer to explain. "Reach gave up her position once she made enough noise to signal Joey. I don't think May or Mack knew the three of them were still together, so she had to relocate to take the heat off Ryan and Jake."

As Bobbi was explaining, Ryan was gathering a soft glow of light in his hands, just enough to illuminate Jake's face while trying to avoid attracting the notice of the Ops team. Jake let loose with a string of what sounded like complete gibberish, but Joey, still facing his teammates, must have been able to see enough of Jake's face to make eye contact and understand the message Jake was trying to send him.

Jake and Ryan moved out, quietly, to meet up with Reach now that their position had been revealed. As they did that, Joey reacted quickly, taking advantage of the information he'd been given and the distraction his teammates had created. He put his hands in front of him and melted the obstacle away with one hand, leveling his ICER with the other. Before Mack could register the utter disappearance of his cover, he was eliminated by a dummy round.

"Two to zero," Bobbi whispered, bumping her elbow into Daisy's to punctuate her point.

Joey didn't stop there. He moved to the trap door, and with another short blast from his hand, melted it shut. Fitz heard Hunter bang against it in frustration after he was trapped inside, and Bobbi giggled, clapping a hand over her mouth.

"He doesn't like being beaten," Bobbi reflected. "If they let him out, he's going to be angry."

Fitz took in the training field in front of them, accessing the situation that faced both sides. May and Hunter were now alone, and Fitz doubted that May had any idea where Hunter was. The chances she could use him as an asset to mount a counter-assault were fairly low.

The Inhumans, on the other hand, seemed to be in a strong position. Three of them were together, and their position gave them a clear line of sight on the two trap doors that Hunter could emerge from to re-enter the battle. May was still hidden, but Fitz had a feeling Reach knew exactly where she was. Whether she had a plan to incapacitate her or not remained to be seen.

Joey was hunkered down behind the ruined obstacle he'd destroyed to reach Mack, looking uncertain about what he should do next. As he looked for an opportunity to move up or regroup with his teammates, May moved silently forward, inching towards Joey's position. Fitz watched Reach, who clearly knew what was happening, but she didn't seem to have any way to alert Joey without giving away their position again.

Their hesitation gave May enough time to reach Joey, circling to the side and easily hitting him with a blank from her ICER. Joey put his hands up, defeated, and retreated to the back of the room.

"Two to one," Daisy said to Bobbi. "There was no way May was going to allow a shutout."

With Joey and his abilities out of commission, there was no way they could block the remaining trap doors, Fitz realized. Reach appeared to be thinking the same thing, as she took Ryan by the arm for a moment. When Reach released his arm, Ryan grabbed Jake and the two of them moved out separately to cover each trap door.

"That's a risky move," Bobbi whispered. "Ryan's behind May, but May has much better cover. She has a pretty good shot on him if she catches sight of him and decides to take it."

May surprised them by hitting the ground and crawling to another obstacle, but Fitz was soon able to see what she was trying to do. She must have heard Jake moving and had an idea of his position, a hunch that was borne out when May got line of sight on him, took a long shot across the room, and hit Jake in the center of the chest with a dummy round.

"I'm out," Jake said, joining Joey at the back of the room.

Hunter chose that moment to open the trap door next to Ryan, probably hoping Jake's removal from the exercise had distracted the Inhuman team enough to allow him to emerge safely. Unfortunately for him, Ryan was there, and Hunter found himself on the unfriendly end of an enemy team ICER.

"I'm hit," Hunter said, conceding through gritted teeth and sounding unmistakably angry.

"He _really_ hates losing," Bobbi said, "but he'll be teasing me for days because I was the first to get taken out."

"You sent him down into the crawl space because he's shorter than you and Mack, though, right?" Daisy guessed, and Bobbi laughed a little before she stopped herself.

"Yeah, I might just have to remind him of that," Bobbi said, as they all turned back to the action on the training floor.

Now that May was the final person remaining on her team, she'd be looking to even things up by taking out Ryan or Reach. She seemed to be intentionally making noise as she moved from obstacle to obstacle.

"She's trying to draw them out. She knows they're both inexperienced, so she's giving them the opportunity to make a mistake," Bobbi explained. "She only needs one of them. Once it's one on one, she can fire a few shots to keep her opponent under cover while she makes a break for the escape zone. I've seen her scale that climbing wall, and she won't need more than five seconds to get out. If she takes out Reach or Ryan here, I think we can win." At Daisy's slightly hurt look, she continued, "Hey, I'm on the Ops team, I have to root for them. Your team has done well, though, Daisy. Win or lose, at this point, Coulson can't deny that you have a solid team, even when you aren't there for them to rely on."

May was inching toward the escape zone, peering around each obstacle carefully, looking for a clear shot on Reach or Ryan. When she didn't find one, she stopped, pulling something off her belt, and threw it to the corner of the room where it clattered against the floor. Ryan swiveled toward it, sending a bright bolt of light toward it.

"Ugh, he thought that was May," Bobbi told them. "He's trying to blind her, but she's nowhere near there. She knows where he is, though," she added, and Fitz could see May closing in on Ryan's location.

Reach was moving as well, but not as quickly or as quietly as May. She wasn't able to catch May in the open as she moved from one cover to the next before May got a clear shot on Ryan. The blank hit Ryan in the chest and his shoulders slumped as he called out, "I'm hit." May immediately shot several rounds toward Reach, showing that she'd been tracking them both.

"Reach is pinned down," Bobbi whispered. "May should make a break for it."

Fitz caught a flash of yellow from the tablet he held in his hands, which he showed to Jemma right away. Reach's pain signature was spiking, flaring brightly in the dark with pulsating yellows and oranges.

"Should we stop the exercise?" Jemma asked, and Fitz was torn. A minor injury in these training exercises was seen as an acceptable risk, and this might be a valuable opportunity for Reach to learn how to re-focus if presented with a similar situation in the field.

"If she goes into the red and holds there, we'll call it. We should let her go for now, if you agree, Jemma," Fitz said, allowing Jemma to take the tablet to look at the data in more detail. She looked uncertain, but she nodded after a moment.

May moved into the open and Reach took a shot, but it went wide. It was enough to send May into cover, though, and she moved quietly from obstacle to obstacle, looking for a new vantage point. 

Reach crouched behind a low wall, her head swiveling from side to side as she tried to pick up any sign of May. She came up a little too high for a moment and a blank sailed just over her head as she ducked at the last second. Reach returned fire, but she didn't have May's aim or experience and the round went nowhere near its intended target.

After Reach's shot, May made a break into the open again, firing twice on Reach's position. Reach came up, avoiding both shots, but Fitz and Jemma watched the monitor flare bright orange both times. They shared a worried look, but as it appeared the exercise would be over in moments, they wordlessly decided not to call it to a halt prematurely.

May fired again and Reach staggered a little, though she still managed to dodge the shot. Reach's ICER was visibly shaking when she leveled it at the fleeing May, causing her return fire to miss again. As May hit the wall and began climbing, the tablet in Jemma's hands went red across the board, every alert lighting up the darkness around them.

That was more than enough for Jemma. "Stop!" Jemma called out, looking up at Coulson in the catwalk above them. "We need to end the exercise."

When the lights came up, Jemma shoved the tablet into Fitz's hands and ran forward, but Ryan got to Reach first. He caught Reach as her body went limp and he crumpled onto the ground with her, holding her half in his lap as Jemma began to examine her.

Lincoln got there a moment later, almost tumbling down the stairs from the catwalk to help. Fitz kept himself from moving forward, knowing that he would simply be in the way of the people who actually had the ability to help. He handed the tablet to Bobbi, hoping she could help him interpret the data the headset was still recording to track Reach's condition.

"She might be regaining consciousness," Bobbi said, tapping through different sets of readings. "It's the same wild pattern we were originally seeing on her EEG, but so much worse," she added, magnifying the brain activity section of the readings. "It's calming down now, but a few seconds ago...it wasn't good."

"Ryan?" Fitz heard Reach say, lifting her hand up weakly toward Ryan's face she laid, slumped, in his lap on the ground.

"You can't do this, Claire," Ryan said, and Fitz was a little surprised to hear him use Reach's real name. "It was just a training exercise. It's not worth hurting yourself like this."

"It wasn't the exercise," Reach said, her voice hoarse, barely louder than a whisper. "It was something else. I was trying to see it more clearly, then everything went black."

"You can worry about that later," Jemma said, accepting the tablet as Bobbi handed it to her. "We need to get her to medical."

Ryan and Lincoln looked at each other, adjusting themselves to pick her up together. Lincoln lifted her legs and Ryan took her under her arms, then they stood and began to move her as carefully as possible. Fitz and Daisy walked with Jemma a few paces behind, all of them looking worried as they made their way to the med bay.

"Don't bench me for this, Daisy," Reach said, her voice still sounding thin and breathy, like she was half asleep. "It wasn't the exercise. It was something else. I just need to look again for a minute and I'll know what's going on."

"Under no circumstances should you use your powers right now," Jemma said, her tone insistent and strong. "I'll stun you myself if I see so much as a blip on this monitor."

Once Reach was settled onto an examination table, Jemma and Lincoln shooed the rest of the group away, the two of them consulting with the medical team on duty as they began to access her condition. 

Ryan broke away from the group when there was an opening at her bedside, earning a scowl from Jemma until she took in the stricken look on his face. She watched him carefully instead of shouting him away, her eyes meeting Fitz's fleetingly as she worked with the rest of the team.

Fitz saw Ryan take Reach's hand carefully into both of his, holding it as though she were made of glass. He leaned down to whisper to her, but he was upset enough that he couldn't keep the volume of his voice down.

"You can't ignore your monitor, Claire," Ryan told her, running his fingers gently along the back of her hand. "I don't want to do this without you."

Jemma broke away from Lincoln and the medical staff, gently putting her hand on Ryan's shoulder and encouraging him to move away. Ryan resisted, looking back at Jemma and silently begging her to let him stay where he was.

"Is she going to be all right?" Ryan asked her, closing his eyes in relief when Jemma nodded.

"We need room to work," Jemma told him.

"I have to get out of the way now, Claire," Ryan said, leaning over Reach so she could see him. She blinked tiredly up at him, her lips curving into a soft smile. Ryan hesitated for a moment, then leaned forward and kissed her. When he pulled back, he took one more moment to brush her hair back from her face where it was caught under the edge of her headset, then he allowed Jemma to lead him away.

Jemma delivered him to a chair at the edge of the room, urging him to sit down. "You can stay as long as you're back here. They won't ask you to leave as long as you don't interfere." She moved to Fitz and Daisy after Ryan sat down, apparently deciding she might be an obstacle to the medical team as well.

"She'll be all right?" Fitz asked, though he'd seen the nod she'd given Ryan and he knew it was redundant to ask her again.

Jemma nodded again, taking Fitz's hand and leaning her head on his shoulder.

"I'll stay here with Ryan," Daisy told them. "I can call you if there's anything you should know. Fitz, I know you're close to Reach, but Ryan's on my team. He's the one who needs someone with him right now, and there's no reason for all of us to be here."

Fitz took a moment to think about it, but nodded when Jemma looked at him, her expression urging him to agree. Jemma lead him back to his quarters where she started a movie, which they both promptly ignored, cuddled up with each other on his bed. After several upbeat updates over the next few hours from Daisy, Fitz was finally able to relax. 

Jemma whispered promises to him that they would find out what had caused Reach's blackout between soft, thoughtful kisses until he'd been so tired he couldn't hold his eyes open any longer. The last thing he could remember before he gave in to sleep was the feel of her fingers against his face as she traced his features in the dark.


	16. Lash

Fitz and Jemma checked in with Reach the next morning. Jemma was there in a more official capacity, consulting with the medical team to evaluate her condition and determine her status with Daisy's team. While Jemma was looking over Reach's chart, Fitz visited with the patient.

"You can't let them bench me," Reach told him quietly, pulling on his arm for emphasis. "It wasn't the exercise. This was weird, Fitz, it hasn't happened before."

"That sounds to me like more of a reason to be careful, not less. If this hasn't happened to you before, we can't know what brought it on or how to keep if from happening again," Fitz explained, bending down to follow her eyes when she looked away from him mid-sentence in frustration.

"It's not like that," she said, smashing her balled fists into her lap as she looked around the room. "Agent May...she must have been actively trying to counter my abilities. She must have been thinking of one plan but executing another, like her thinking was layered and I couldn't penetrate through to her real thoughts."

"I don't doubt for a moment that she was attempting to throw you off in any way she could," Fitz explained, wondering if he could communicate how unbelievably gifted May was in the field in a way that would even begin to get the idea across to Reach. "I've seen her do things I wouldn't have thought possible if I hadn't seen it for myself, and the stories about her, they're more like legends. Except, largely, they're true."

Reach waved her hands and shook her head, as though she was trying to rewind the conversation. "I've haven't been here long, but even I know Agent May is completely spooky. I get it. That's not the point of what I was trying to tell you."

"All right," Fitz said, sitting back a little and waiting for Reach to explain.

"I was trying to out-think her. I couldn't get through the conflicting images she was sending out, so I completely opened up." She took a breath and was about to start speaking again, then paused, obviously having trouble finding the words to describe what she was thinking. "You'd almost have to understand how my power works to know what I did, and even I can't tell you that. I guess...have you ever been in a room with a lot going on at the same time, people talking, music playing, television on, but you have to focus on something else?"

"Being in the field is like that sometimes, yeah," he said, thinking back over some of the roles he'd taken on S.H.I.E.L.D. missions after joining Coulson's team. "Sometimes there's been a lot happening around me, but I've had to concentrate on my task or the whole mission would have gone south."

"Okay," Reach began. "Imagine that situation, except that you suddenly find yourself able to take in all the information at once. You process everything going on around you, every conversation, every movement of the other team members, but you're still able to concentrate on what you need to do. You can do it...until you can't. It's too much, and you pass out. That's what happened to me. I was desperate to catch Agent May and I didn't control my power at all, I just opened up and let everything in."

"Wouldn't it just be complete gibberish? Or were you able to understand it?" Fitz asked, fascinated at having this unique look at her abilities, especially as they hadn't been able to quantify or explain them with known scientific concepts yet.

"It was," she said. "But I got pieces. I tried to hang onto what I'd been trying to see, but it got overpowered. Something big is out there. I couldn't place it in time, but—" she said, stopping abruptly as she looked at Fitz, pursing her lips together thoughtfully.

"But what?" he prompted.

"I can't say," she said, looking at him apologetically. "It's what Simmons said, about having too much information about your future. What I saw, it's about the team. I can't tell you. I don't want to influence the events. At least, not this far ahead."

He was suddenly dying to ask her a thousand questions, but he couldn't fault her reasoning. He'd seen the damage that could be done with even trivial knowledge of future events.

"There's a moment, if I saw things correctly, where the team is going to need me." She grabbed his hand, her eyes burning intensely as her fingers closed almost painfully around his. "I'm going to have to be on the mission, though, Fitz. You have to get me reinstated."

"I can't overrule the medical team, or Coulson. I'm not sure what you expect me to do."

"I know you can't do it on your own, but these people trust you. I need you to help me convince them."

Fitz wanted to ask what the stakes were, needing to understand why she was so adamant, but he knew it wasn't just an unfair question. It danced on the edge of being hopelessly selfish. If he knew Reach, she was trying to protect someone. It shouldn't matter to him who might be the one in danger.

"I'll do what I can," he promised, trying not to tell himself that speculation would get him nowhere if Reach had decided she couldn't divulge what she'd seen. He was trying to think of something else to say, some other conversation that didn't seem odd after the intense exchange they'd just had, when Jemma and one of the doctors asked interrupted them for another evaluation of her condition.

* * *

_Three weeks after Reach's injury_

Fitz stood next to Simmons in the back of Coulson's office, thinking over the information they'd just been given. It didn't take him long, because there wasn't much to go on.

The information in the briefing was scant, filled with more conjecture than detail. Coulson himself seemed reluctant to plan a mission around it based on what little they had, except the intel included information about Lash being moved from one facility to another. Leads about Hydra's plans and Lash's whereabouts had been non-existent for months, and it seemed unthinkable to let the opportunity go without a response of some kind from S.H.I.E.L.D.

"Daisy, is your team ready? It's a dangerous mission for all of you, with Lash in play," Coulson turned to Daisy and Lincoln, who were standing protectively in front of their team of Inhuman recruits.

"We're ready," Daisy said, her voice even and her shoulders squared toward him.

"Bobbi, Fitzsimmons, you've been tracking their training progress and readiness. Bobbi, your opinion on their tactical preparation?" Coulson continued.

"You've seen several of the training exercises we've been running, sir," Bobbi noted. "There's no question they're an asset in the field, and they have a much better grasp on their strengths and weaknesses after these last few trials."

"Fitzsimmons, I need you to weigh in on medical and tech readiness," Coulson said, and Fitz could see Daisy bristling with anger at her team being evaluated so openly, especially after no other agent's mission fitness seemed to be in question.

Jemma flashed Fitz a look filled with hesitance and uncertainty and he knew what she was thinking. They'd had this debate behind closed doors for weeks, with Fitz arguing for Reach's reinstatement against Jemma's desire to make that determination more cautiously.

He waited for Jemma to speak, knowing that Jemma's medical evaluation of the team was the more important information to Coulson, though he was holding his breath and hoping he'd managed to convince her during their private discussions. He knew Reach's concern about the mysterious vision she'd had and he intended to argue for her inclusion, but he was hoping to avoid having to publicly contradict Jemma's judgment while doing so.

"I did have some reservations, sir, based on injuries sustained during training, but there have been no serious incidents after the first training exercise Daisy's team completed. I believe her team to be fit for duty, sir," Jemma said, avoiding Fitz's eye as he nodded silently to Coulson. Fitz knew she was going against her own instincts and trusting his, and he wasn't sure how he felt about her making that decision.

They had little time to prepare, which forced them to narrow the mission parameters. The plan was to capture Lash, avoiding engagement with Hydra unless it was necessary to complete the mission objective. That meant a lot of last-minute work for Jemma and Fitz, who had to produce at least one super-capacity ICER, hopefully capable of incapacitating Lash. Fitz's immediate thought was that it was impossible to complete the modifications in the timeframe they were given, but in the end, they'd managed to retrofit three standard ICERs with a design he and Jemma agreed was their best chance of success.

* * *

The mission itself went wrong so quickly that Fitz couldn't fully comprehend the cascade of disasters that had splintered the team. The careful groups Coulson had designed the mission around had been forced apart by Hydra's tactical movements, leaving the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents scattered. The whole thing was a trap, but ironically, Coulson had suspected that from the beginning. They'd proceeded with the mission despite the risk, desperate to stop Lash's attacks on the new Inhumans who were emerging. Unfortunately, it seemed the odds had been even more stacked against them than Coulson had anticipated.

The power to the building had been cut and Fitz, like most of the team, had been left almost blind. Night vision goggles should have been standard gear for an operation like this, but in their rush to prepare, Fitz doubted that there were more than a handful of pairs in the hands of his teammates. Comms had also gone down just after they'd all started to report their groups compromised, which could only mean that Hydra had somehow acquired inside information about the primary and backup frequencies the team was using. 

Fitz was alone inside the storage bay of an abandoned factory, eluding capture by hiding behind a stack of packing crates he'd been able to rearrange to conceal him. He had been timing the patrols and found they were operating regularly, a pair of operatives coming through every five minutes. From what he'd been able to overhear, he knew at least one member of their team had been captured. He was trying very hard not to think about who it might be, given that nearly every person in the world he cared about was on this mission with him. 

There was a rendezvous point for exactly this eventuality, but after the breakdown in comms, Fitz didn't know if the mission plan could be trusted. Alone, in the dark, and completely cut off from the rest of his team, Fitz had to decide what to do. 

He allowed himself the luxury of weighing his options until the next patrol came through, but when he'd thought of no better plan, he decided to try his luck at the fallback point. Ignoring the slight shake in the hand that held his ICER, he crept out of his hiding place after the most recent pair of Hydra goons cleared the room and he began to move, silently as possible, toward his goal.

He was forced to take cover twice as he made his way through the shadows, sure each time that he would be discovered, but managing to evade them at the last moment. When he felt a hand fall on his shoulder about halfway to the rendezvous point, he whirled around, nearly letting a blast from the ICER loose before he recognized the features of Bobbi's face in the darkness.

"Can't go to the rendezvous," Bobbi whispered, and as Fitz leaned in to listen more closely, he saw May emerge from the next bend in the corridor. "The whole mission's been blown. Simmons recognized one of your lab techs in a group of Hydra thugs a few minutes ago, so we have to assume the original plan isn't safe."

"Simmons!" Fitz said, his whisper far too loud, fueled with overpowering relief that Bobbi had heard from Jemma. Lowering his voice, he continued, "Where is she now?"

Bobbi held up her two-way radio. "She's with Mack." At Fitz's confused look, she explained further. "Hunter and I have our own private frequency that our mole didn't know about. He was able to get to Mack and Simmons right after everything went to hell, and the three of them have established our new rendezvous point. It's as easy as anything will be to defend, and it's close to an exit that will get us back to the plane."

"I miss having the resources for a real extraction plan," May growled, scanning their surroundings as her fingers curled around the pistol she was carrying. "Can't stay here, too easy to get surrounded."

Fitz was about to ask for more details, but May was already on the move and he fell into step behind her. Bobbi covered them from behind and they made their way quietly through the back hallways of the facility. 

"Hunter's back out there, looking for the rest of the team," Bobbi whispered as she walked backward next to him, her eyes scanning rapidly for any signs of movement in the darkness behind them.

"He'll be all right," Fitz told her.

"It's Hunter. If he gets caught, he'll annoy Hydra to death and escape," Bobbi said, but her dark humor ran hollow. Fitz could hear the worry in her voice, but he just nodded. Hunter could handle himself, and if anyone could actually annoy Hydra to death, he'd be the man to get it done.

"I heard some of the Hydra operatives talking, while I was waiting for an opening to get myself out," Fitz said, whispering a little louder so May would be able to hear him as well. "They've got someone from our team. I don't know who."

"We'll find them," May said, tersely. "I'm not leaving anyone here."

The radio unit at Bobbi's hip crackled a little, and Fitz heard a soft series of taps coming through the speaker. Bobbi unholstered it and brought it to her mouth, then whispered, "Hunter, we're clear for now, go ahead," into it.

"Found Coulson, but he's hit," came Hunter's answering rasp. "I left him with Mack and Simmons at our new exit point. Simmons says it's not bad, but we need to get him out of here as soon as we can. Who are you with?"

"May and Fitz," Bobbi answered.

"Any sign of Daisy and her team yet?" Hunter asked.

"Negative," Bobbi told him. "They were on the far east side of the building before everything went south."

"On my way there now," Hunter answered, but then there was a long pause, filled with a soft, crackly white noise, but Bobbi kept the link open. Fitz, mindful of the noise they were making, was about to ask her about it, but when Hunter began to speak again, he realized she'd somehow sensed that Hunter wasn't done talking yet. "I have one of the overcharged ICERs, the ones we brought to knock out Lash. Got it from Coulson. I'm still trying for the main objective."

Over her shoulder, May glared at the radio. "Call him off. We need to get everyone out and Coulson back to base."

"Sorry, May. Couldn't quite make that out," came Hunter's voice through the speaker.

May was about to answer when a pair of Hydra operatives appeared from around a bend in the corridor a few yards away from them. Their stances changed quickly when they saw the three S.H.I.E.L.D. agents ahead of them, crouching defensively and bringing their weapons forward. When the first bullets ricocheted off the wall behind Fitz's head, he felt Bobbi's hand on his shoulder, roughly pushing him down.

He tried to tuck his shoulder under and go down smoothly, hoping to grab his ICER and use it to disable at least one of the enemy agents, but he didn't have time. He hit the ground heavily, a short burst of pain radiating from the arm that took the brunt of the fall. He could hear the scuffle as he struggled to right himself and pull the ICER, but by the time he looked up, May and Bobbi had dealt with the two men, who were now lying unconscious on the floor at their feet. Bobbi was already zip-tying their wrists and ankles, and by the time Fitz was up, all he could do was help drag the two men out of the corridor and into a closet.

"There's more where they came from," Bobbi noted. "We have to keep moving."

"Do you have one of the modified ICERs?" May asked, glancing at Fitz over her shoulder.

"We only had time to modify three of them. Coulson had one, and the other two are with Daisy's team," Fitz explained.

May nodded. "Daisy and the others are in the most danger. That was a good call."

"I wish we'd had time to modify all of them," Fitz added, wishing he had argued against the mission based on the lack of prep time, though he wondered if it would have done any good. He thought of all the ways they might have avoided falling into this trap, chiding himself all along for wasting energy on useless thoughts that wouldn't change anything. Just as he was about to force it out of his mind to put his energy into something more constructive, he realized something that was so obvious he couldn't believe he'd missed it until now. One person on the team might have seen this coming, but she'd let the mission plans continue without divulging what she knew.

"There was no time to convert them all, Fitz," Bobbi whispered to him. "Don't beat yourself up over—"

"—I think Reach may have known." He stopped walking as soon as he'd interrupted Bobbi, his mind racing too fast to concentrate on anything else until he'd worked it out entirely. "She saw something a few weeks ago. It's what caused her blackout during the first training exercise. She wouldn't tell me what it was, but she was desperate not to get sidelined from this mission. She may have seen this, all of this. The mole, the trap."

"If she did, there has to be some reason she'd let the mission go through," Bobbi suggested. "It's all speculation, though. We have to go on what we know."

"We need to locate the rest of the team. We can't figure out our next move until everyone's accounted for," May said, her voice low and dangerous-sounding.

Bobbi's radio crackled with static again, followed by Hunter's pattern of taps as she brought it to her mouth and thumbed the button to transmit. "Hunter? What have you got?"

"We've got movement over here," Hunter said, sounding out of breath. "I heard a chase and a few shots and I tracked it to the loading dock. They've got our people cornered in there, and they're covered by six of those Hydra wankers. Sounds like they're waiting for something to arrive....I think it's Lash. I need backup, Bob." Hunter's whisper was barely audible over the electronic hum of the radio.

Fitz tried not to think about what Lash would do to a team full of Inhumans and instead, started coming up with a plan to rescue them. They needed to find Hunter and get everyone out of there.

There was a pause, just long enough for Fitz to worry that Hunter had been discovered, but Hunter keyed the radio link open again. He seemed to be hesitating a bit before he spoke. "They have Simmons as well. I think that was the chase I heard," Hunter finally said, and a dizzying wave of rage came over Fitz.

Fitz snatched the radio out of Bobbi's hands. "Tell me where you are," he demanded, remembering to whisper at the last second. "You said she was safe with Mack," he added, then realized his thoughts were jumbling together. He had to pull himself together, or he wouldn't be of any use to anyone.

"Don't know what happened," Hunter said. "We'll get her out, mate. Just get here and give me some backup." 

Bobbi took the radio back from Fitz, pulling it gently out of his fingers, and they ducked into an empty room. Once the door was shut behind them and May had declared the room clear, Bobbi and Hunter began to formulate a plan to meet up while May kept watch. Fitz was busy making plans of his own between frantic bouts of worry, taking stock of the equipment he'd brought with him and looking for ways he could help with the rescue the rest of them were piecing together.

When Bobbi finally holstered the radio and looked at them, Fitz froze, his hands full of various devices he'd pulled out to consider their usefulness.

"Hunter's done some recon and we have a plan, but we need to move fast," Bobbi began. "We don't want to give Hydra time to bring in any more guards. Hunter's suggested we go in from above, and the best place for us to get into the ductwork is from here. We can use those filing cabinets to boost us into the ceiling."

May was already moving before Bobbi finished, testing the cabinets briefly for stability before she began to scale them. When she was at the top, she silently put out her hand and looked directly at Fitz, and he accepted her help gratefully. His bad hand was much better in general, but his decreased grip strength would have made the climb difficult had he attempted it on his own. 

"I've got a Magic Window in my pack," Fitz whispered to May as they were waiting for Bobbi to join them. "Should let us see inside the room before we have to make our move."

May nodded, putting out her hand again to help Bobbi to the top. Bobbi cautiously pushed up a ceiling tile, then pulled herself up.

"There's no access into the duct from here. Fitz, do you have anything—" Bobbi began, and Fitz cut her off by scrambling into the ceiling and pulling his plasma cutter out of the inside pocket of his jacket.

He made quick work of it, cutting an opening large enough for them to get through as May climbed up, replacing the ceiling tile behind them. When he was done, Bobbi went first, as she had their only pair of night vision goggles among them and she could lead the way. May motioned Fitz in after Bobbi, and she followed behind.

It was more difficult than he thought, moving through the ductwork quietly enough to keep them from discovery. Fitz soon found the only way was to go down on his forearms and slide forward in an army crawl instead of trying to lift his hands or knees up. While that solved the noise issue, it kicked up enough of the dust crusting the interior of the duct to irritate his nose and throat, and he could feel a sneeze threatening to escape him. He had to pause for a moment to yank the zipper down on his jacket, but he was able to quickly pull the black t-shirt he wore underneath up to cover his nose and mouth. 

It was awful, grueling work, but they inched through the ducts. Bobbi lead the way through several intersections, her movements sure as she advanced them toward the meeting point she and Hunter had agreed upon.

Fitz's arms were burning and his eyes were watering freely to ward off the dust when Bobbi finally stopped, then she reached out to make a series of soft taps on the side of the duct, the same pattern Fitz had heard Bobbi and Hunter use over the radio. An answering pair of taps came from just a bit ahead of where they were. Bobbi moved up and then looked back at Fitz, holding her hand over a section of ductwork behind her. He took the hint and got out the plasma cutter, giving them a hatch just wide enough for them to squeeze through.

May motioned for Fitz to go through first, and when he'd crawled through, he found Hunter on the other side waiting for them. May emerged next, followed by Bobbi. Fitz wasted no time pulling out the Magic Window, unrolling it and laying it out to see inside the room beneath them.

The four of them whispered to each other as they identified each of the heat signatures on the surface of the Magic Window. Once they had a feel for the layout, May found a spot where they could pull a section of the ceiling aside just enough to hear what was being said below them.

They quickly learned that most of the Hydra operatives were still searching for the S.H.I.E.L.D. team in the other parts of the facility. Fitz could only hope that Mack had gotten himself and Coulson to cover and were safe, but he couldn't spare them any more thought than that, not with the situation facing them in the room below.

Daisy's team was gathered together near the far end of the room, and from what they could hear from the chatter amongst the guards, they were all aware they were in a room full of Inhumans with unknown, powerful abilities. From the heat signatures he'd seen, Fitz was sure Jemma was with them. It sounded like they'd all been tied up and they were waiting for the arrival of a truck at the loading dock.

Hunter motioned the rest of the agents to him, then whispered, "They still haven't said it outright, but from what they were saying earlier, I'm betting it's Lash they're waiting for."

"We have to make a move now," May said, her hands curling into fists. "The mission's blown. We can't risk a confrontation with Lash, not under these circumstances."

"So we get down there, take out the guards, and get our people out," Bobbi whispered. "Ideas?"

Using the small amount of light coming from the opening they'd risked leaving in the ceiling, the four of them drew a makeshift diagram of the room below. Some of Fitz's tools were pressed into service to act as stand-ins for the four of them, and they laid out a plan to take control of the room.

Before Fitz could register what was about to happen, May tapped him on the shoulder, pulling him to the area above their captive team members. Bobbi and Hunter were at the other corner, positioning themselves to drop down behind the guards and take them out. 

Fitz was thankful for the cordage he'd packed into his gear, remembering how he'd grabbed it almost as an afterthought. Even cut in half, each section was long enough to allow each pair to drop down without injury. He held his breath as he cut a small section of the ceiling away, looping the cordage through the hole and hoping his shaking hands could execute the double running bowline knot that would allow the line to bear their weight. When he looked up, Hunter was doing something similar with Bobbi's help.

May held her hand up and the rest of them locked eyes on her. On her signal, Fitz and Hunter kicked out the ceiling tiles closest to their entry points, with May and Bobbi descending down the rope as soon as their path was clear. Fitz and Hunter followed closely behind.

Fitz hit the ground on his feet, but too unsteady to stay up. As he righted himself, he looked around quickly to get his bearings. His eyes lit immediately on Simmons, sitting propped against the wall, her hands and feet bound.

He heard the scuffle across the room and he could only hope Bobbi and Hunter were winning the battle. The low, tell-tale hum of Bobbi's battle staves reassured him she, at least, was still in the fight, but he couldn't spare the attention to check on them. He and May worked quickly to free their captured teammates, Fitz releasing Jemma first and kissing her quickly before he could stop himself.

As Fitz cut the the last person free, he glanced over his shoulder to find Bobbi and Hunter tying up all six of the Hydra guards, each of them clearly unconscious. He allowed relief to wash over him as he watched Jemma checking in with each member of Daisy's team.

"We need to move," came May's insistent voice, and she beckoned to the rest of the team to follow Hunter and Bobbi through the door to the new rendezvous point. None of them had a chance to move before they were interrupted by the sound of a truck pulling up to the open loading bay dock.

Fitz looked up, watching as the door on the back of the truck rolled upward. Fear gripped him as he saw the back-lit shape there, a not-quite-human form, tall and broad as it stalked forward. He jumped forward, covering more distance than seemed possible, and the light overhead revealed him to be Lash. He headed immediately for the team of Inhumans, his teeth bared as he let out a terrifying roar.

May immediately changed tactics, heading for Lash while she shouted to the rest of the team to evacuate. Fitz noticed most of the team hesitating, none of them wanting to abandon May to the fight on her own, but May continued to order them to get to the evacuation point.

Fitz helped Daisy and Jemma gather the Inhuman team together, sending them toward the door where Bobbi was waiting to lead them out. Hunter, his hand closing over the modified ICER he carried, rushed forward to face off against Lash with May. He stayed back a few feet, waiting for an open shot, but Lash was moving so quickly and May was so close that Fitz knew it would be difficult for him to find an opportunity.

Daisy and Reach paused when Hunter joined May, each of them watching May as she circled around Lash, dodging his attempts to attack her. Fitz ran back, hearing Jemma's startled cry when he pulled away from her, but he kept moving until he was able to grab Daisy and Reach by their tac jackets. He pulled each of them with him, and he was almost back to the rest of the group when he heard May cry out behind them.

Lash finally connected with May and she fell to the floor, clutching her right shoulder. Lash rounded on Hunter as he raised the ICER, knocking him to the ground as well with the back of his arm.

Fitz's attention wavered and Reach broke away from him. She fell to the floor in front of the incapacitated guards, rifling through their uniforms until she found what she was looking for. When she stood up, she was holding one of their modified ICERs, and she had a clear shot on Lash.

Ryan broke away from the group, heading toward Reach and shouting her name. Reach hesitated when she heard his voice, and that was all the opening Lash needed.

Lash leapt forward, closing on Reach, and her first shot toward him went wide. She looked back, seeing Ryan coming toward her, and she tossed him the ICER. Using herself as bait, she lead Lash away from the rest of the group. Ryan froze, screaming out her name again as Lash attacked her.

She crumpled to the ground as May scrambled toward Ryan, relieving him of the ICER and rounding on Lash, stunning him into unconsciousness in one shot. He fell to the ground next to Reach. Hunter had managed to get himself back to his feet, and he doubled back to meet May near the two fallen combatants.

"Get Reach," May ordered, looking at Hunter. "We leave Lash. It's not safe to transport him with the mission blown this badly. Everyone else, get to the escape point."

Hunter put Reach over his shoulders in a fireman's carry and they moved out. They managed to move through the facility without any contact with Hydra, and once they'd found Mack hiding the injured Coulson near the new rendezvous point, they ran to the jet, leaving the shambles of a mission behind them.


	17. Critical

The interior of the jet was bedlam. May got them in the air as quickly as possible, which made the ride bumpy as they cut upwards through the air. Bobbi was tending to the bullet wound in Coulson's shoulder while Lincoln and Jemma were frantically working on Reach, who was laid out on the floor of the jet, her gear covered with blood.

Fitz forced himself to stay back, able to see how serious Reach's injuries were simply by reading the expression on Jemma's face. Ryan had stayed at her side from the moment they began their escape, but finally allowed Daisy to pull him into a nearby jump seat once it became clear Jemma and Lincoln needed the space around her clear of anyone who couldn't help them save her life.

"Fitz," Jemma called out, and he jumped to his feet, getting to her side as quickly as he could. "I need more supplies, but Lincoln and I are both applying pressure to stop the bleeding."

Fitz tried not to look down, not ready to see how bad it was. "What do you need, and where can I find it?"

"There's a hard-sided case back there," she said, indicating the area behind Daisy and a stricken-looking Ryan with a sharp tilt of her chin. "There should be packages of sterile dressing, a roll of surgical instruments, and alcohol visible when you open the case. We need to cover this wound with something that will keep her lungs from collapsing. Can't be gauze, it has to be more impermeable. Even plastic packaging will do. There should be tape in there as well. Doesn't need to be bandage tape, find any tape."

Fitz moved past Daisy, kneeling in front of the case as he ripped it open and began to look for the supplies Jemma asked him to find. His hands were shaking and he willed them to stop, cursing as he had to shift the contents of the container to the side when he couldn't find the roll of instruments at first.

"Let me help out, mate," Hunter said, crouching next to Fitz. "I heard Simmons, and I've had to help Bobbi with this sort of stuff before."

Fitz gratefully moved over a bit and let Hunter pluck the instruments out of the shadows, watching as he added it to the pile.

"Still need something plastic, and the tape," Fitz said, running his eyes over the pile they'd accumulated to take stock.

"The gauze is in plastic packaging," Hunter pointed out, looking up at Bobbi, who was nearby tending to the bullet wound in Coulson's shoulder. 

"It's not sterile, but it's probably the best thing we have access to here. If you found some alcohol, they can wipe it down, that should help," Bobbi told them.

Fitz nodded, busy rifling through the bottom layer of the case for a moment before he came up with the tape Jemma needed. Hunter pressed the items into his hands and he delivered the materials to Jemma, getting on his knees next to her and spreading everything out.

"We need to stabilize the pressure in her chest," Lincoln said, quickly lifting the dressing to get a better look at the damage from the deep gash in Reach's chest.

"I had Fitz find some thin plastic. We can tape it down over her chest wound." She fixed Lincoln with an intense look, her jaw set with concentration as her eyes scanned over their patient. "Unless you think she's already developing tension pneumothorax."

"It's a sucking chest wound. We have to stop the flow of air into her chest. I think it's the best chance for her until we get her back to the Playground," Lincoln asked, holding out the hand that wasn't applying pressure to the wound and wordlessly asking for the materials to get started.

"Open that packet of sterile dressings, Fitz," Jemma began, "but you'll have to be very careful. We need one flat, continuous patch, at least four inches square."

Fitz's hands continued to shake for a moment as he picked up the package, but he took a deep breath and was able to steady himself long enough to make a long, careful tear along the top. He laid the dressings to the side, then flattened out the plastic and handed it to Jemma.

Lincoln was already cleaning the area around the wound as well as he could, but the gauze was turning red as quickly as he could wipe the blood away. Jemma splashed alcohol on the patch and then began to cover the wound with the plastic, layering lengths of tape over it to hold it down.

"It's hard to get a good seal," Jemma said, her voice tense as she continued to work. "I don't know if I can make this work. Lincoln, how's her breathing?"

"Did you take her monitor off?" Fitz asked, seeing that the armband Reach wore to accommodate it was empty. "Her headset's intact. The data it's transmitting should be helpful."

"It was smashed," Jemma answered, then she looked at Fitz, her eyes hopeful. "You don't have your tablet, do you?"

"Hunter, slide me my pack," Fitz called out, and Hunter pushed it across to him. Fitz honestly couldn't remember if it would be there or not, his thoughts were so chaotic. He ripped the zipper open, shoving his hand into several compartments until his fingers slipped along the smooth edge of the tablet.

He brought it out, then gasped as the monitoring program opened and the screen was a sea of red. Given the obvious critical nature of the injuries Reach had sustained, it shouldn't have shocked him, but he simply hadn't been prepared to see it.

"Hold it up for me?" Jemma said, bracing herself as the jet hit a particularly nasty pocket of turbulence. Her eyes scanned the data and he saw her shoulders fall, but just for a moment before she squared them again, looking more determined than ever. 

"We need to get more air into her. Do we have a BVM?" Lincoln asked, his eyes locked with Jemma's.

"I'm not sure," she answered. "Fitz, in the case, did you see a resuscitation mask? Should be a red bag, attached to a—"

"—I think I saw one," he answered, crawling across the floor to the supply case and rifling through it until he found what he was looking for. Lincoln put out his hands and Fitz got it to him, passing it in front of Jemma as she continued to hold the patch over Reach's chest wound in place.

The mask covered the lower half of Reach's face as Lincoln began to rhythmically inflate and deflate the bag. Reach's chest rose and fell more visibly, and after a few respirations, Fitz caught a glimpse of her fingers twitching.

"She moved her—" Fitz began, but was cut off when Reach suddenly lifted her hand and grasped his wrist.

Fitz felt the somewhat familiar wave of nausea tug at his stomach as he was pulled away from the scene on the floor of the jet, feeling like he was floating in a dark sea of fog once the tug subsided.

"Hey, Scotty," he heard, Reach's voice echoing strangely in his ears, as though he was hearing it from somewhere else. "I didn't know if this would work. I've been trying this when Agent May had me meditating, creating this space inside my head I could go to. It's weird, it feels like this is where my power is, like this is that new 'thing' Lincoln was telling me my transformation gave me. I didn't know if I could pull anyone else into it. Had to try, though."

"You need to stop," Fitz said, remembering the red screen on the tablet, then feeling a lurch of disorientation as he realized he was still in the jet, holding the screen up for Jemma to watch, though every sense he had of his body told him he wasn't there anymore. This darkness, this strange pocket of reality inside Reach's mind, felt as real as anything else ever had to him.

"I can't," she said, sounding hesitant. "I know what's going to happen now, Fitz. I can hold it back, but not for very much longer. I've slowed the whole flow of time for the two of us, and yeah, I don't know how I'm doing it either."

"That's strength you need to put into surviving this. Jemma and Lincoln are working on you now. They've got you breathing steadily again. She's holding you together with her own hands, Reach. Stop this and let me out of here so you have a chance to make it though," Fitz begged her, his voice seeming to reverberate around him.

"They can't stop it. Fitz. I can see the future, remember? It blacks out a few minutes from now. I need you to do some things for me."

"No," he argued, not wanting to listen. "None of this is set in stone. You have to fight."

"Stop wasting time," she said, her voice suddenly sharp. "I have so much stuff I need to say and I don't have enough time to say it in." She chuckled, but it was a dark, humorless laugh. "I never thought I would run out of time. I guess being able to push and pull on it made me think I could boss it around, but I guess it always wins in the end."

"Reach—"

"First, you need to tell Ryan this wasn't his fault. We were in the dark and he was lighting the corridors for us to make our way out. That's when one of the patrols found us. He thinks they saw the light he was putting out and they wouldn't have found us otherwise. I don't care whether he was wrong or right. Just tell him it wasn't his fault, okay?"

"Yeah," Fitz agreed, wondering if he could rush her through everything she felt she had to do and get her to stop using her power that way. There didn't seem to be any other way to stop her.

"Next, you need to know what Simmons did. She saved Director Coulson, probably Mack too."

"Listen, she's trying to save _you_ right now, and she's not going to forgive herself if she can't," he said, deciding to try once more to get her to save her energy. "You need to stop this and give her all the help you can."

"Dammit, Fitz. I need you to listen. I don't have a lot of time," Reach's voice echoed around him. "Simmons almost got us out of there. If there'd been fewer of them guarding us, she might have done it. She and Mack were taking care of Coulson and establishing a new rendezvous with Hunter, but once Hunter left, they heard a patrol coming. There wasn't enough room for all of them to hide, and since Simmons couldn't move the Director on her own, she left them and used herself as a decoy to lead the patrol away."

"What...how do you know—" Fitz began, but Reach cut him off.

"Daisy asked her about the rest of you, if Simmons knew whether anyone else was safe. Fitz, you have to stop interrupting," Reach said, her voice still strangely echoing around him, but sounding more tired and quieter, somehow. "She managed to take out two of the guys with her ICER, but the third one caught her and brought her to us. She and Daisy were working on a plan to take on the guys guarding us when you guys dropped in, talking through Jake so they wouldn't overhear anything. I don't even know what languages they were speaking, but they must have both been something Jake's already learned. One of those asshole guards kept threatening Daisy, and Fitz, you should have heard Jemma talking back to him. She mouthed off to him like she owned the place."

Fitz was struggling with the images in his imagination, feeling sick at the idea of Jemma being in such direct, terrible danger again. He had to find some way to come to terms with this sort of thing if they were going to stay with S.H.I.E.L.D., but hearing about yet another near-death scrape she'd had to endure made him want to punch something.

"She can handle herself, your girl," Reach said, and he could hear the admiration in her voice. "I thought I could, too. I just wanted to protect my friends, you know? Capture Lash, because he's out there, killing Inhumans until one of us takes him out. I wanted to show you all that I belonged here, that I could do this just like the rest of you."

"No one doubted you, Reach, but when May called for us to get out of there, you needed to follow the order. You didn't have to prove anything."

"I saw the whole mission during that first training exercise. Do you remember? When I passed out at the end going after May?"

"Yeah, I wondered about that," Fitz said, thinking back to the moment in the hallway with May and Bobbi when he'd realized Reach must have known what was going to happen. "I thought you must have seen that the mission tonight wasn't going to go as planned. Why didn't you tell anyone?"

"What I saw...we got Lash, Fitz. Some of us had to get captured, but we were supposed to succeed. I figured it was worth the risk to get Lash. I'm a crap shot, but Ryan's amazing on the gun range. When I tossed him that ICER, Ryan was supposed to take the shot. I still don't know why he didn't."

"He saw Lash coming at you," Fitz explained, wondering how she didn't already understand what had happened. "He cares about you, Reach, and when he saw that, he couldn't concentrate on anything else."

"Lash is going to keep coming for them, for all of them, until he takes every last one of us out. How could he _not_ take the shot?" she asked, sounding frustrated on the surface, but he could hear something else in her voice. It was as though it had never occurred to her how much she meant to Ryan, so she hadn't even considered how he might hesitate to act because he was more concerned for her than for the outcome of the mission.

"You should have told us," Fitz said, wishing she hadn't felt the need to keep it all to herself.

"If I had, the Director would never have approved the mission. I tried it out," she explained, and it suddenly occurred to Fitz that this might not be the only time they'd attempted to capture Lash.

"Have you already reset this?" he asked, already knowing the answer.

"The first time, I told you all at the briefing about what I saw, and the mission never happened. I had to keep it to myself to get us there. I pulled it back the next two times after everything went wrong," Reach admitted.

"Went wrong?"

"It was Simmons," Reach said, the words bouncing around the room in a rush. "She died trying to save Director Coulson and Mack. I couldn't do anything to help her this third time. I just had to hope she'd be luckier, that they wouldn't drag her dead body into the room with us. You should have heard Daisy when she saw her, and I knew what it would do to you if something happened to her."

"Reset it again," Fitz demanded, forcibly avoiding any consideration of the consequences.

"I can't," she said, and her tired laugh reverberated through him. "I have enough energy for this, but not enough to pull it all back again. It just goes black when I even try to peek back."

"You need to stop. They can still save you. I know you must feel so weak, like giving up, but you have to fight," Fitz begged her.

"There is no future I can see that doesn't just blank out," Reach told him, "and I can see a lot. I'd rather try something with this last burst of energy I have, Fitz. I don't want to disappear, and you're my only chance. If I attempt this with Ryan, I don't think I'll be able to hold it together."

"What do you want to do?" he asked.

"I meant what I said a few weeks ago, that if I disappeared, there's no one who really knew me enough to really miss me. All of you are the closest thing I have to anyone who cares, and even you don't know very much about who I was before this. I want to show you who I am, as much as I can until I run out of time."

"Yeah," Fitz managed to choke out, his throat closing as he took in the desperate sadness of her plea. "What do I need to—" he began, but was overcome with images before he could finish.

He saw a woman with dark black hair sitting on the edge of a bed where a little girl was tucked under a blanket, clutching a pink teddy bear. The woman was singing a song he didn't know, brushing her hand over the girl's hair as the child yawned. The scene went black when the child's eyes closed.

The next scene resolved in front of Fitz, the image clear, but fuzzing at the edges. This time, Reach was riding in a grocery cart, watching as her mom tapped some numbers into a calculator each time she considered putting something in the cart. A look of worry occasionally broke through the silly smiles she gave her daughter, but it turned into an expression of bereft sadness when Reach saw a bag of candy at the register and asked for it. In the vision, Reach couldn't understand why her mother told her no and she began to cry. As Fitz watched, he could sense that the grown-up Reach realized that her mother had never had enough money for what they needed, much less extra treats, and she regretted making things harder by asking for things they couldn't afford.

As the image faded, Fitz heard a distorted-sounding version of her mother's voice, saying, "We have to stick together, the two of us, sweetie. I'm so sorry, I know it's sad that we can't have that candy." It reminded Fitz of the many times he'd watched his own mum try to scrape enough money together for the things they needed as he was growing up.

A new image resolved in front of him, focused on a car full of teenagers driving on a dark, country road. The radio was on and they were all singing along. Reach was in the back seat, and Fitz could hear what she was thinking. She wanted to relax and have a good time, but she knew her mom was home waiting and that she was three hours past her curfew. When she tried to get them to drop her off at home before they went to the next party, they laughed and teased her, and he could feel her torn between her friends and not wanting her mom to worry. It all went black before he could see what happened next.

The next scene shimmered into focus, following Reach as she walked through the hallway of a school, looking almost the same as she had in the car with her friends. She got to an open area behind a long desk, and the woman sitting behind it gave her a tearful, heartbroken look. Reach was ushered into an office behind the desk where there were two policemen, and her first thought was of a lipstick she'd shoplifted. Just as she was trying to figure out what she'd tell her mother if she'd been caught stealing, she focused on the questions the officers were asking her. They verified her mother's name and their address, then asked her to sit down. Fitz couldn't hear what the officers said after they told Reach about the car accident that had killed her mother, but he saw Reach fall to the floor, her body curling up as she cried out in pain.

When that image went away, he saw a slightly older Reach quitting her job as her manager accused her of stealing money out of the register. He could feel Reach's burning rage, but the manager refused to listen to her as she protested her innocence. That faded into Reach in an apartment, standing by a battered couch and hugging her arms to herself again as she told the man opposite her about the powers she'd just realized she had. When he pulled a knife out of his pocket and called her a freak, that scene went black as well.

The images got faster and blurrier after that, though the settings were more familiar to him. He saw himself finding her in the cabin the night they'd raced to get to her before Hydra and Lash. That turned quickly into still snapshots of Reach training with May, Daisy, and Bobbi, and of himself and Simmons fitting her with her headset.

Everything went black for several long seconds, then he could feel Reach putting everything she had into one last effort. She showed him herself in the medical bay, tucked under a blanket with Ryan sitting next to her. They were playing some silly game with their hands, each of them trying to grab the other, and they were giggling quietly. Ryan sent a quick blast of light at her and she startled and missed his hand, laughing madly as she accused him of cheating. As she blinked at him, his expression changed and was much more serious, and they both quieted. She sat forward, tugging him toward her, and he pulled her into a long, sweet kiss.

"I really like you, Claire," he whispered, his mouth so close to her still that his lips brushed hers as he spoke. 

Fitz could feel everything Reach had felt, how perfectly happy she was, how he made her feel like she belonged there with him, and how it was the first time since she was little that things had ever been so clear and uncomplicated for her. She leaned forward into him, resting her forehead against his, until she saw the worried look on his face.

"I really like you too, you dork. Do I really need to say it? You saw me grinning at you like an idiot, didn't you?" she whispered to him.

It all went dark then. The fog surrounding him was gone, as was the shadowy sense he had of Reach being inside his mind with him. He blinked his eyes open, fighting another wave of nausea as he was thrust back into the regular flow of reality.

He shook his head to clear it, realizing he was still kneeling on the floor next to Jemma, holding the tablet out for her to watch as she and Lincoln worked to save Reach.

"Her heart rate's crashing, EEG's flat," Jemma said, the panic evident in her voice even as he could hear her trying to stay calm and clear enough to keep working.

"Jemma, she was just…" Fitz began, not sure how to communicate to her what had just happened. "I was just with her, she pulled me into some sort of vision to talk to me." He looked down at his wrist where she'd managed to grab him and her hand was lying on the floor next to him, limp and lifeless.

"She shouldn't have—" Jemma began, but Fitz stopped her.

"I tried to tell her. She said it didn't matter, that she could already see what was going to happen," Fitz explained, his eyes fixed on the flat readings on the tablet he held between them.

Lincoln still worked feverishly next to them, forcing air in and out of her lungs, but the slight movement that caused in her chest was the only remaining sign of life. Jemma put her hands over Lincoln's, shaking her head at him as Fitz watched the tears begin to spill over her cheeks.

"Why aren't they working?" Ryan's voice came from behind them, and Fitz couldn't make himself turn around to take in the anguish he knew he would see there. "You have to keep trying to save her."

"I'm sorry, Ryan," Lincoln said, his voice breaking. "We did everything we could."

Fitz felt his own tears of anger and helplessness escape him as Jemma collapsed into him. He dimly heard Ryan cry out and he wished there was something he was capable of doing to help him, but he couldn't do anything other than cling to Jemma, remembering everything Reach had shown him before she'd drifted away.


	18. Epilogue

Fitz stood in front of the S.H.I.E.L.D. memorial wall at the Playground, running his hand over the engraving on the new plaque that had just been added.

_Claire "Reach" Capani_

Jemma put her hands on his shoulders from behind him and he leaned back into her, letting her arms slip around him to pull him closer.

"I didn't see when Ryan left, did you? Was someone with him?" Jemma asked, and he nodded, remembering how broken Ryan had been as he'd leaned on Daisy and Jake while Koenig attached the plaque.

"Daisy told me she'd stay with him," Fitz said, his voice giving out at the end of the sentence, and Jemma's arms tightened around him.

"I wish there had been more we could do," Jemma said, not for the first time since they'd lost Reach on the jet.

"You and Lincoln did everything you could with what we had. Her injuries were just too severe," he told her, reaching up to squeeze her hand. 

They stood in silence for a few minutes, Fitz thinking over what he'd seen when Reach had used her powers for the last time. He hadn't shared what he'd seen with anyone yet, but he knew Reach had used the last of her strength to keep herself from being forgotten. He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself enough to speak.

"She showed me some things," he began, and Jemma pulled away just long enough to move in front of him. Her eyes searched his as he tried to hold together, but the tears started when she reached up to cup his face. He struggled to talk again, suddenly sure that Reach had wanted him to let everyone know how happy she'd been in the few weeks she'd had with all of them.

"What did you see?" she said, pulling him closer and nestling her head under his chin. "Do you want to talk about it?"

He took one more breath, picturing a tiny Reach with a small, tired smile on her face as her mother sung her to sleep. 

"Yeah, I think she wanted me to," he told her. "This was the first place where she felt she really belonged."

Jemma held him there, in front of the plaque, as he told her everything he could remember.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, there's the second hard decision I had to make that I referred to many chapters ago. The first was allowing Fitz to ask for the reset even though it was at least ethically grey. The second was much larger, and that was whether I would stick with my original decision about the fate of Reach after this mission to capture Lash. I know some of you may be sad, and may even think it was unnecessary. All I can say is that the end of her story was the first thing that came to me when I got the idea for the plot at all, and the initial draft of her death in the jet was the first part of this story I ever wrote. I think her sacrifice to try to stop Lash from killing more Inhumans, as well as to save Jemma, is substantial and meaningful, even though she was ultimately unsuccessful. You may differ in your opinion, and if you do, I welcome you to let me know.
> 
> You may wonder why she saw Fitz going to Maveth, and I can now reveal why I didn't explain that at the time in the notes. (I nearly did leave a chapter note, actually, but decided not to because it suggests in a roundabout way the outcome of the fic and Reach's fate.)
> 
> My original idea was for this fic to take up from around 3x08 or 3x09, but a version of what might have happened if Jemma and Fitz were the main characters of the show. (Do you mean they're not? Yeah, sadly, they aren't. I know.) I wanted to create a version of the timeline that could almost-sort of match up with canon by the time we pick up episode 3x10, with some deletions and additions. So the ACTU storyline went away (more of a Coulson main character arc) and the Fitzsimmons reconciliation came forward and moved more quickly. They'll still be grabbed by Hydra in this timeline and Fitz will still be forced through the portal to Maveth, and that's what Reach saw when she saw him with a blacked out portion of his life in the near future.
> 
> That all being said...I hope you've enjoyed the story, even those of you who may not be super excited about the ending. I was really touched that many people who commented let me know how much they liked Reach as a character, and I hope that although her fate was sad, it gives weight to her actions and the decisions she tried to make to protect everyone.
> 
> Thank you all so much for reading.


End file.
